


Whale Song

by SylphofScript



Series: Warren is Strange [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Explicit Language, F/F, M/M, Mental Instability, Other, Slow Burn, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 10:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 102,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13901667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphofScript/pseuds/SylphofScript
Summary: Sequel to Warren is Strange. The story's not over yet.





	1. The End

**Author's Note:**

> I just realized I never made note of this anywhere, but this is probably **not** compliant with Before the Storm! I started writing the very beginning of this before it had been released and haven't played the game yet just in case it makes me want to go back and revamp _everything._ (I can do that after this is all written. Or something.)
> 
> So there may be bits wrong here and there! I actually have next to no idea what Before the Storm even touches on in terms of the aftermath from the first game (if it even does at all), and even though this is a completely different timeline, there may still be a few things that are wrong. Sorry about that!
> 
> Please enjoy all the same! ♡

When Warren wakes up, it’s to something that sounds vaguely like a large cow either giving birth or being probed—neither of which he wants to witness, so, naturally, he doesn’t open his eyes immediately. The sounds continue to invade his ear space; not too loudly, but enough that he can definitely hear _something_.

Was it Senior Prank Day? Did someone bring a cow into the dorms as a prank? Warren thought you were supposed to do that to faculty, not necessarily the student body. Most schools didn’t really have a dorm system, though, so maybe that’s why they chose the dorms. Or maybe there’s another cow in the school, running rampant and shitting everywhere. Chewing things, like cows do. He kind of hoped that was the case. That would be interesting.

No, wait. That’s too deep for a cow, isn’t it?

Warren closes his eyes tighter, concentrating on the sounds. Cows … well, _moo_. This is more like a _wooohuahuahua_ kind of noise. Maybe it was a bull being probed? Or a llama?

Wait, that noise sounded distinctly like a dinosaur. What?

What sounded like both a cow and a dinosaur? Was that _reverberating_ he was hearing?

What the hell?

Warren wasn’t awake enough for this, and lying in bed playing guessing games wasn’t helping. With a quick stretch of one arm into the air and a groan that’s echoed by a cowasaur call, Warren pulls his legs from his sheets and rolls out of bed—literally—then both jumps out of his skin and consequently falls flat on his face when he steps on, then stumbles over, a body sprawled out on his floor.

_Really?_

_“Augh!”_

Well, it was a live one, if that ungodly noise was any indication. The taste of carpet in Warren’s mouth keeps him from being happy about that right in the moment, though.

“That was my _ankle_ , Graham! Mothershitting ass! Did you break it?! That hurt, you fat fuck!”

“ _Nathan!_ ” Warren pulls himself up from the carpet’s musty embrace, twisting around to face the culprit of his fall. Nathan sends daggers at Warren from where he sits clutching his bare ankle. “What the hell are you doing? I thought I locked my door!”

He did lock his door. He remembered doing it the night before after Max had left because he didn’t want Nathan barging into his room before he’d woken up for the day, like Nathan had started doing. Because Nathan didn’t sleep enough, which meant Warren didn’t need to, either. Knocking, apparently, was no longer a necessity. Unless, of course, it was Warren going to Nathan’s room.

Of _course_.

“You did,” Nathan confirms. He’s looking down at his ankle and probing it with a thumb. Warren did not break it. He probably didn’t even sprain it. He probably didn’t even bruise it! It was totally touch-and-go. “I _un_ locked it.”

“With what?” Warren asks incredulously, his tone rising in pitch. Nathan, rather than giving an answer, just stares at him. Warren tries reason first, despite the fact nothing else was following suit. “A key? Where did you get a key to my room?”

Nathan continues to look at him like he’s stupid. “Off your desk, dumbass.”

“You took my only key into my room? _When?_ ”

“God, are you still seriously having trouble with time? It’s been forever since you had your loop issue. I was just here yesterday.”

Yes, yes he was. Warren hardly went a day without seeing Nathan at some point, and it wasn’t just because they lived in the same place and went to school together. There had been a stall when Nathan had been at risk of prosecution, after the cops had found binders of Rachel’s pictures in a room built with Prescott money, but, with a lack of good evidence (Warren was refused the whole story, but Nathan, thank God, had thought ahead of the game and destroyed incriminating evidence that would have possibly pegged him with Rachel’s murder, despite Jefferson’s attempt to frame him. There had apparently been more to it involving Max’s powers before they had vanished completely, but that story Warren still didn’t know, either.) and a convincing donation from his family, Nathan was allowed to walk free without so much as a mark against him.

The week and some that followed left him incredibly unstable, with the accusations and the probing and the claims of his scheme being “legendary” courtesy of the media hawks that tortured him. He was sequestered to his therapist under firm orders, but returned to the school before long. Warren had visited him, but, now that he was back to living across from Warren, Nathan was around Warren almost as much as he was with Victoria.

If you had asked Warren if he ever expected Nathan Prescott to _want_ to see him previous to his … episode, he would have thought _you_ were having an episode. Or trying to make a joke. It was unprecedented, to say the least.

Warren sighs. “You took my room key. Yesterday. My only key to lock my door from the outside.”

“You weren’t planning on leaving, obviously. You didn’t even notice it was gone.”

That was so not the point. Nathan knew that. Warren knew he didn’t care. _Ugh_.

“Why are you lying on my floor? Right here? There’s plenty of space elsewhere! Why where I can step on you? What is that _noise_?”

“Hey, bitch, look around. You left piles of shit everywhere, did you want me rolling all over them?”

Warren glances behind him, and then has to admit Nathan’s right. Max had been helping him with a project that required more artistic skill than Warren possessed (he could draw decently, but other forms of art he lacked in), and Warren had been too beat to clean everything up before going to bed once she’d left. Still.

“You could have moved something. How was I supposed to see you if you were right by my bed?”

“By using those things in your moronic skull called eyes?” Nathan suggests spitefully. Warren rolls his in response.

“You were asking for the chance to get stepped on by being there, that’s all I’m saying.” With a huff, Warren pulls himself to his feet to start gathering things up. “What are you even doing in here, anyway? And, seriously, what the shit _is_ that? It sounds like a Antican orgy.”

“Have you never heard whales before?” Nathan asks, but the way he says it makes Warren feel like he had missed a crucial part of adolescence by _not_ having heard whales before.

Warren frowns, then shakes his head in disbelief. “Whale song? Why are you listening to that?”

Nathan doesn’t answer. He’s looking right at Warren— _still_ holding his ankle, God—but he only stares. Then, he reaches up and taps his forehead twice. Oh.

“Oh,” Warren echoes. “Bad day? Shouldn’t you call your therapist?”

Again, Nathan doesn’t answer him. He doesn’t look at him, either, but he’s scowling. Then, something crosses Warren’s mind, and his insides seize up suddenly enough to make him inhale sharply. Nathan looks back in question.

It takes a second for Warren to compose himself and ask, “You didn’t, like, _see_ anything. Right?”

“Do you really think I’d be sitting here calmly if that happened?” Nathan asks slowly, then, quietly, but still loud enough so Warren can hear, “Jesus, how did you even get into this school?”

Warren gives him an unamused look, which Nathan sees but remains unfazed by. He did have a point, though. If Nathan had seen something, he’d probably still be in his room right now freaking out. That, or waking Warren up, which Warren hoped he’d do either before or instead of panicking.

“Right,” Warren mumbles, scrubbing his hair back, then bends to start cleaning. “Sorry.” A picture falls from the stack as he’s picking up, and it flutters its way within Nathan’s reach. Nathan, being who he was, picks it up without asking and looks at it.

“Cocktease totally took this one, it’s got her bullshit hipster pixie thumbprint all over it,” he declares.

“Stop calling her that,” Warren pushes, not for the first time. “She’s civil to you, why do you have to be such an ass back? You don’t do this shit to Victoria, right?”

Nathan looks offended. “What kind of asswit question is that? Vic isn’t a cock tease.”

“Yeah, well, neither is Max.”

“The shoe still fits, stop pretending it doesn’t.”

“ _No_ , Nathan,” Warren says firmly, dropping the armful of art supplies onto his desk with a _whump_. “She never led me on, you fucking know that. Have you even been paying attention? Max and Chloe were _just_ with us the other day, or do you pretend they’re just a couple more voices in your head that need to be ignored?”

The look Nathan gives Warren is reminiscent of a Nathan from another loop, and Warren can feel his insides freezing. Warren agrees—that was too far. Warren averts his gaze to his calendar on the wall. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “That was mean.”

Nathan ignores the apology, which is a bad sign. “I don’t give a fuck what Dyke One and Dyke Two are doing with each other,” Nathan says dangerously. “I will say ‘I told you so’ though, because I fucking told you so.”

“Stop _calling_ them that,” Warren mutters, but he’s lost any of the steam he had a moment ago. This was just Nathan Prescott. Different from the Nathan Prescott in the failed loops, but Nathan Prescott all the same. Three weeks of bonding over catching a murder didn’t change that.

There’s nothing between them but the continued whale song as Warren shuffles through his closet and finds his clothes for the day. He pulls a jacket out along with his usual shirt-and-jeans ensemble, because it’s starting to get damn cold outside. Arms full of fabric, he finally looks at Nathan again. Nathan is looking at his phone.

“Can you go?” Warren says. “I don’t wanna spend all day in my pajamas.”

Nathan glances up from his phone, bored, then looks back at it again. “So get dressed.”

For fuck’s sake. “I’m planning on it. I’m not getting naked in front of you. Leave.”

“No. I’m not going to look.”

“Prescott. Come _on_.”

“I’ll cover my goddamn eyes if you’re going to be such a bitch, god.” And, before Warren can say something and tell him that’s _not_ going to cut it, Nathan raises a hand and presses it over his eyes, his phone deposited on the floor next to him. Warren continues to stand there.

“How can you throw gross names around when it’s Chloe liking girls, but then ignore the implied prejudice when it involves you directly?” Warren asks, anger rising. Nathan drops his hand, and he’s glaring when it falls.

“I don’t give a fuck what kind of person Price is actually interested in screwing. I’d call her what I want even if she didn’t want to munch carpet. Sometimes the shoe actually fits.”

Warren gives Nathan an exaggerated look of disgust, because, honestly, that _did_ sound like Nathan. That didn’t make it any less awful. Nathan’s eyes narrow dangerously in response, and his hands curl into fists.

“Don’t get mad at me for assuming you had a problem with gays,” Warren says, ignoring the warning signs flashing in his mind to stop. Cease and desist. Bad idea, _bad idea_! What happened to the Warren who only deliberately picked fights when he was defending someone? “With the way you talk, anyone would come to that conclusion. You wouldn’t even get in the water because the ‘homos’ were in it.”

Nathan’s mouth flattens until it’s a thin line in his face. Warren finds himself unable to stop, maybe because he kind of missed the feeling of dying. Or maybe because he was just a fucking sixteen-year-old moron who was letting his testosterone get the better of him, which was the more likely option. “I’m just saying, I wouldn’t be shocked if you did care and you were only saying otherwise to argue with me about it.”

“I just fucking told you, I _don’t_ care.” Nathan stands up and stalks over to him, his bare feet thumping ominously on the floor. Warren’s arms tense around the clothes he’s holding, wondering if they’d make a good cushion for the blow if he managed to get his arms up fast enough.

But Nathan’s arms aren’t raised, and the fists his hands are in are still by his hips. Tense, but not poised for a hit. Warren doesn’t raise his arms fast enough, anyway, before Nathan’s encroaching in on his personal bubble, not unlike the time he head-butted him. Warren flinches, but the blow doesn’t come.

What Warren doesn’t expect—because, seriously, fast and furious action is way more up Nathan’s alley—is for Nathan’s hand to snap up into his face and latch onto the back of his head, pulling his head back and up, dangerously close to Nathan’s scowling face. There’s not even time to blink. It’s a closeness unexpected enough that Warren still anticipates the head-butt and almost bites his own lip off when it gets caught between his suddenly-clenched teeth, a motion between inhaling a breath and shutting his mouth before he says something stupid and makes it worse.

He’s not scared—this might have scared him before, but once you’ve faced down an ungodly tornado a handful of times, you gain a lot of nerve—but he _does_ _not_ want to start a fist fight. Not really.

Nathan holds him close enough that Warren’s pretty sure not even a jelly bean would fit in the space they had left. He can _feel_ Nathan breathing on him, and, okay, now he’s freaking out. Just a little.

 _It totally looks like he’s going to kiss me_ , Warren’s brain supplies in a moment of useless distraction. He knows a few people who would probably _love_ that.

“I. Don’t. _Care_.” Nathan hisses each word slowly, firmly, in a low, low voice. His pupils are blown wide and there’s a burning anger within them that Warren hasn’t seen since the Jefferson incident. Like there’s some war happening in Nathan’s head that only he sees and only he can hear, and both sides are fought by him alone. His nails dig into the back of Warren’s head, and then he pulls away and returns to Warren’s bed, dropping into it instead of onto the floor and turning away before it without another word.

Warren’s mouth hurts. He thinks his lip might be bleeding.

He’s such a wild mess of confusion in that moment that all he can do is stand and stare.

It wouldn’t be not the first time he’s been kissed (thank God). It wouldn’t even the first time he’s kissed a guy (the year he turned fifteen was a wild one, and sometimes D&D campaigns got a little _too_ exciting—but they don’t kiss any differently than girls anyway, not in Warren’s experience, so he doesn’t really get the big deal), but _Nathan Prescott_? Max might actually die of laughter when he tells her. Chloe _would_ die if she caught wind.

Fuck. Should he tell her? He tells her a lot, but this might be too far on the scale of embarrassment to admit.

This was going to get him for a while. Dicklord probably knew that, too. Fuck him.

Why was this even bothering him? It was a scare-tactic Nathan had used. Was he really so desensitized to Nathan’s threats that his mind immediately went down the gutter instead of where it should go?

Warren drops his clothes, pushes the thought away, and he starts to strip. Nathan doesn’t turn around, not when Warren’s hesitating with his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers, not when he pulls the new ones on so fast he nearly trips himself, and not when Warren’s finally pulling on his jeans and reaching for his jacket. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t even turn around when Warren grabs his phone off his nightstand and leaves.

 

* * *

 

Warren knows Max is hanging around the photography lab today, probably with Kate and Stella, so that’s where he heads once he’s out of the dorms.

On his way there, he passes Victoria and her posse, who are no doubt scheming something that would put _Mean Girls_ to shame. Victoria glances over at him as he passes, then does a double-take, and the next thing he knows she’s got his jacket in her fist with an iron grip.

“Where’s Nate?” she asks him before he’s even finished stumbling over his sudden stop. She looks back the way Warren came. Warren tries to shrug her off, but that doesn’t happen.

“I don’t know,” he answers, still trying to shrug her off. “I left him in my room. Maybe he went back to his room. Somewhere in the dorms?” he tries, because that sounds like a big enough ballpark to be right about. Victoria doesn’t like the answer, though.

“Why isn’t he with _you_?”

Warren stares at her. She isn’t kidding, not with that expression. “Why would he be with me?”

“Because he’s not with me?” Victoria says like it’s obvious. Warren can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. Behind them, Courtney and Taylor watch them, their hands covering their mouths like they’re smothering a laugh.

“Huh? How is that weird?” Warren asks. “He’s alone all the time.”

“Oh, _god_ ,” Victoria spits in disgust. She finally drops Warren’s arm, and he pulls it closer to himself the moment it’s free. She whips a phone seemingly out of nowhere and starts tapping on the screen. “You’ve only been riding his back for weeks. You were a _distraction_ , dumbass,” Victoria says when Warren’s still looking at her in confusion.

And that clicks it in place for him.

Oh, fuck. The whole reason Nathan was in his room in the first place. Warren had gotten caught up in the argument, he hadn’t— _shit_. Way to be a friend, asshole.

Victoria’s in the middle of saying something when Warren turns and walks away, but he wasn’t listening in the first place, so he doesn’t know what it was she was saying. He hears her yell in protest when she realizes he’s leaving before she’s done, but he ignores that, too.

When he gets back to his room, he almost expects Nathan to have left, but he’s sitting on the bed with one of Warren’s Stephen King books ( _Under the Dome_ —the hardcover edition. Yeah. Nathan could knock him out with that if he wanted.) perched on his crossed legs. After placing his finger on the page he’s open to, Nathan looks up, both eyebrows raised.

“Victoria ratted you out, but I thought you’d take longer,” he says.

Warren shrugs, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him. “You underestimate my conscience. Sorry I totally bailed out on you.”

“Don’t worry,” Nathan says, reaching to Warren’s nightstand and taking the photo of Max’s that he must have put there. He places it in the book and shuts it. Warren waits, hands in the pockets of his jacket, for Nathan to pull himself from Warren’s bed and give him a smirk that was far from sunny grin. Warren feels his heart drop. “You’ll be making it up for me tonight.”

“I have plans tonight,” he protests. It’s Vampire Night at the drive-in. He was going with Chloe, Max, Kate, and maybe Stella. He’d been looking forward to it.

“Sucks to suck, then, doesn’t it?” Nathan says nonchalantly.

“Nathan, come on.”

“Nope, you dug your own damn grave. We need a ‘tender tonight.”

“You want me to handle alcohol?” Warren asks, making a face. “I’m the youngest person at the school, how is that a smart thing to do?”

“You’re a sneaky little shit, that’s how. No one will suspect you, either, since you look about seven.”

Okay, Warren’s offended. “I do not! I’ll be seventeen in, like, three weeks!”

Nathan tilts his head. “Excuse the fuck out of me,” he says, like he’s impressed. “Didn’t know that.”

“I’ll help you at the Halloween party,” Warren promises, but Nathan rejects the compromise with a shake of his head.

“No. Logan’s doing it then.” Nathan’s eyes drop to the floor, searching around. For what, Warren doesn’t know. “He’s got ideas for it. If you want to fight him for the position, be my guest, but you’re not getting out of tonight otherwise.”

Warren makes a quiet noise of frustration just as Nathan bends down and grabs something from under Warren’s bed—his shoe, with his sock crammed into it. “You’re such a Grade-A asshole,” Warren mutters, scrubbing his hand over his mouth.

“Watch it, teenybopper,” Nathan warns him, settled back on Warren’s bed as he puts his single shoe on, “I’m leagues above you on the totem pole. Don’t piss me off or you’ll regret it.”

For some reason, that comment stings Warren like nothing else Nathan has said that morning. Warren glowers at him, watching as he looks for and locates his second shoe, then stands up to face Warren once it’s on his foot. For a moment, as he straightens his jacket over his sweater, he doesn’t slouch.

 _Please let me not be finished growing_ , Warren thinks bitterly, noting that Nathan _is_ taller than him. Then Nathan returns to his usual hunched slump and they’re the same height again. Nathan scrutinizes Warren for a beat, then reaches out to grasp Warren’s shoulder and pull him out of the way of the door.

“You have a little something on your lip,” Nathan says has he passes Warren with his head down, then he’s out the door and gone.

Warren presses his fingers against his lip, finding dried blood on them when he pulls them away again.

 

* * *

 

“C’mon Graham,” Trevor begs, leaning heavily on the bar (nothing more than some high, long tables covered in tarp and cloth, which wobble under his weight) with his cup pushed up into Warren’s face for the third time that night. “Fill ‘er up!”

Warren takes the cup from Trevor’s hand and chucks it in the over-filled trash can by the edge of the bar, wiping his sticky hand on his jeans and ignoring the whining noise Trevor gives him when he realizes he’s not getting his cup back.

“Water?” Warren offers instead, holding a bottle up.

“No, no way. There’s plenty of that right there.” Trevor turns and points a hand at the pool, which is flashing with all the lights in the room.

“Don’t drink the pool water, dude,” Warren warns him, but Trevor’s already slumped off dejectedly. Warren watches him go. He’s pretty clearly more than just drunk, but Warren doesn’t think that’s unusual for the setting.

 _No_ , he thinks, flinching when a memory of Kate’s video from a past loop flashes in his mind, _it’s not. It’s not at all._

Warren decides he really, really doesn’t want to be here.

Someone falls in the pool. Then someone else decides they want to go in, too, and suddenly four people are throwing themselves into the water. A few people squeal from the sidelines when they get hit by the spray. The music nearly drowns their cries out.

Warren checks his phone. It’s almost ten—the movie marathon has been running for two hours now. Warren wonders what he missed already, and what else he’s going to miss as the movies play well on into the early morning, possibly ending with a showing of _Nosferatu_. He _hates_ Nathan right now.

“You don’t look like you’re having much fun,” a voice says, startling Warren into dropping his phone. It’s Alyssa, leaning on the bar with her head cradled in her hand. Warren sighs in relief, unsure of what it was he was even afraid of in the first place. It’s not like he was getting paid for this.

“I’m not,” he confirms, loudly, because mother of Vulcan the music was booming. “Vortex Club parties are only good in moderation.”

“Very true,” she agrees with a nod. “Haven’t seen you at one lately, though. I went to the last one myself.”

“I was at the last one,” Warren corrects her.

“Wouldn’t really count that. You came in with that girl and left, like, five minutes later.”

Warren hesitates in confusion.

Right. To get Victoria, and the last four—no, five (four?) times he went never actually happened. Shit.

“Must have been thinking of a different time,” Warren mutters, which isn’t a lie. Then, when Alyssa frowns at him, continues at a volume she can hear him at, “I guess I haven’t been to one since school started. Being trapped back here is my actual issue.”

“How’d you get stuck doing this, anyway?”

“Prescott.” Warren rolls his eyes. “I owed him.”

Not totally true, but he did fuck up that morning pretty bad, and he still felt bad about it.

“You two are close now. It’s so weird, considering. Nathan’s _such_ a tool.”

“Say it again!” Warren calls, laughing.

“Are you, like, perpetually indebted to him or something?” Alyssa asks, throwing Warren through a loop. He blinks.

“What?”

“You’re not actually friends,” she says, like it’s not a question.

“Uh,” Warren says, his brain stumbling over her words. “No, we are.”

Alyssa doesn’t look convinced. “How? Doesn’t he call you names? He still calls Max names.”

“That’s kind of a Nathan-brand thing. Max hangs out with him, too, sometimes. I think they’re considered friends.” Ish. Definitely ish.

“I don’t think he’s ever called Victoria anything. I thought they were friends. Are they dating?”

Nathan claims they’re not, but he’s called her names before. Just not the same kinds he uses on everyone else. He’s called her gorgeous more than once, among other flattering names, but Warren knows what Alyssa means. It didn’t really bother him, though, the fact Nathan still called him “Gayram” and other various insults. It’s when he was doing it to be overly nasty that Warren pushed against him. The other names were okay. He certainly didn’t want Nathan calling him _gorgeous_.

Max didn’t care, either, and Chloe just shot them back when Nathan used them on her.

“Victoria’s different,” Warren says with a shrug. “It’s not an issue.”

“Did Victoria also catch a creepy psycho murderer with him?” Alyssa asks.

Okay, what was the point of this? Yes, his friendship with Nathan was wholly uncalled for and still kind of confusing, but it was there. Warren had saved Nathan from getting killed (not that anyone knew that part) and Nathan had helped Warren catch Jefferson before he could kill anyone else. Nathan had _believed_ Warren when his story had been told, when he could have just as easily been the risky psychopath everyone accused him of being. Nathan had _let Warren cry on him_ , that was real friendship! But how did he explain that to all the people who didn’t get it?

Why did it even matter so much?

“It’s not like that, Alyssa,” Warren finally says after a moment of thought.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt. You’re a good guy, Warren. Nathan is…”

“A long drop and a short stop,” Warren mumbles to himself with a grimace.

“What?”

“Nothing. Thanks for being concerned, but it’s okay. I’ve got Chloe behind my back, anyway. She’s a force to be reckoned with.”

“Who?”

But Warren waves his hand quickly, indicating it didn’t matter, and Alyssa, thankfully, accepts that.

“Got anything stronger than beer back there?” she asks. Warren frowns and kicks open the cooler, picking out one of the bottles with a black cap. Black cap meant not-soda. It didn’t tell him what it meant aside from that, though.

“Uh,” he says, twisting the bottle open and giving it a sniff. He winces at what hits his nose—definitely not beer. “I don’t know what it is, but yes.”

“Hit me.”

“Soda?”

“Straight.”

Oh, ugh. Warren could barely handle beer, and beer is as far as he has gotten.

Grabbing a clean Solo cup, Warren tips the bottle until the liquid—he couldn’t tell what color it was with the constant flashing lights, but it looks dark enough to resemble the bottles of cola—fills the very bottom. Was that a shot? Was that more than a shot?

There was a way to tell. Something about fingers. God, could he feel more underage right in this moment? “Youngest student at Blackwell Academy” felt like such a far cry from praise right now.

He gives it to Alyssa anyway, who knocks it back in one gulp and sets the cup back down.

“Another.”

Warren refills the cup again and slides it back, but Alyssa slides it towards him again as he’s twisting the cap back on the bottle. “One for you,” she tells him, then reaches in to pat his arm and leave. Warren puts the bottle back in the cooler and stares at the cup. Dare he?

Yes. Because fuck Nathan Prescott.

“That had better be your first fucking drink,” a new voice calls at him just as he’s tipping the liquid down his throat. He startles, chokes, and slams the cup down on the sticky makeshift bar, trying not to gag. His eyes water from the burn. “Jesus fuck, pussy much?”

Speak of the devil.

Warren tries to clear his throat, but it only makes it feel thicker. And people drank this crap _willingly_? Nathan waits—surprisingly patiently—while Warren tries to regain the ability to speak.

“What _was_ that?” Warren gasps, and he sounds like he just finished drowning.

“Dunno,” Nathan answers. He’s got a slight lilt to his mouth, and his posture is relaxed rather than slumped, like he just finished doing something that relieved all his tension. Drugs? Sex? “I don’t stock this booze. How much have you had, Graham?”

“That was my first.” And his last. Yikes.

“Good. I don’t remember saying you could drink what you served.”

Warren drops his elbows on the bar and scrubs both hands through his slightly sticky— _how?_ —hair. “This _sucks_.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo. Life sucks, kid.”

Warren snaps his head up, “No, not you, too. Stop. I’m _not_ a _kid_.”

“Is that what you were thinking when you were choking on that?” Nathan sneers, flicking a finger at the cup Warren had left on the bar.

“Shut up, Nathan,” Warren says. Grabbing the cup, he throws it on top of the trash can and watches it bounce onto the floor instead. Whatever. When he looks back to the bar again, Nathan’s still there, watching him. “What?” he asks apprehensively.

Nathan doesn’t answer right away. His gaze scans Warren, centering in on his eyes like he’s trying to find something there. It makes Warren uneasy as hell.

“That was your only drink?” Nathan asks.

“Yeah, I just said that. I didn’t drink anything else.”

“You poured it?”

“Yes?” Warren frowns, glancing around the area behind the bar with his arms out. “There’s no one else here. I’m the only one pouring drinks.”

Nathan nods, like this information is satisfying, then turns around and leaves without another word. Warren calls after him, but he’s already too far away to hear.

 

* * *

 

The night goes at an ungodly slow speed. Warren spends the entire time regretting that shot—his throat throbs like he has something lodged in it, and clearing it only made it worse.

People start to trickle out an hour before the party officially wraps up, and Warren ends up wasting most of the time asking Max for updates on the marathon from his phone, which is now sticky from being dropped on the gross floor. When it’s clear no one else is up for drinks—because there’s, like, six people still going, and one of them is the DJ—Warren decides it’s time for him to vacate the disgusting, hot bar area. He’d come to the party without a jacket, knowing it to be warm inside from all the bodies, but stuck in a corner with no way to escape the lights like he had been? _Sweltering_.

Warren wanders to one of the poolside areas, where the benches are set up, and starts to relieve his torso from the T-shirt he had layered over a thermal.

“You’re still here, Graham?”

Warren pulls his head from his shirt to find Trevor standing before him. He seems slightly soberer than he did two hours ago. He’s also half-naked and soaking wet.

“Still not technically off duty,” Warren explains. He wraps his shirt into a ball and sets it on the bench, enjoying the slight drop in temperature. “Don’t blab to Nathan.”

“Dude, lips? So locked up right now.” Trevor nods his head as if agreeing to his own statement.

“Thanks.” Warren wasn’t sure how much he could actually trust Trevor’s word when he was clearly at least half-baked, but he didn’t really have a choice. Besides, what could Nathan do?

“Yo, you look hot.”

“What?” Warren looks up Trevor, startled, then realizes he means temperature-wise. “Oh. Yeah, it’s really fucking hot in here.”

“Take a dip,” Trevor says, gesturing to the pool like Warren wouldn’t know what he meant. “I did. Feels awesome.”

Warren glances at the soaked jeans that adorned Trevor, then down at his own clothes.

“Pass. Been there, I’ll live without a second go.”

“No, no. I insist, it’ll help. It’s a huge rush, totally worth it! Take your shoes off.”

“What? No. I’m fine here.”

“Bro, come on.” Trevor grabs both of Warren’s shoulders and pushes until Warren’s knees give and he thumps down on the bench directly behind him, then stoops down and starts removing Warren’s shoes.

“Dude—” Warren starts, but both his shoes end up off as Trevor takes one in each hand and practically yanks them off.

“Whoa! We throwin’ Graham into the pool? Hell yeah!” Warren looks up from Trevor to find Justin grinning down at him, also half-naked.

Oh. Oh, no.

“Wait—What? Wh—” Warren’s cut off by hands gripping the bottom of his thermal and removing it from his person in one fell swoop. He just barely has time to fish his phone out of his pocket and toss it on the discarded clothing on the bench before Justin’s picking him up in a bear hug he can’t struggle out of and throwing him into the pool—without letting him go.

Trevor was right about one thing: it did cool Warren off immediately.

Warren breaks the surface of the pool, gasping, then scrapes his wet hair from his face and kicks to the side. The water in the pool rocks with the motion of Trevor jumping in and, once Warren’s got an arm hooked on the edge and he looks back, both Trevor and Justin are treading water and pushing each other.

Warren leaves them to it and busies himself with peeling his wet socks from his feet, which Trevor hadn’t removed. They don’t make it anywhere near his clothing pile when he throws them at the bench, but they’re in the relative area, so it’s good enough.

By the time the DJ wraps up and Nathan emerges from the VIP area with Hayden, Warren’s engaged himself in a game with Trevor and Justin as the judge for their contest. What he was judging was beyond his scope of understanding, since the guys were alternating between jumps, flips, and doing things underwater that Warren couldn’t even see, but none of them were particularly concerned. Warren gave them random scores each time they asked and they either didn’t seem to realize it or didn’t care.

“The fuck are you doing in the pool?” Nathan asks the moment he notices.

“Swimming,” Warren retorts, then ducks when Trevor jumps a little too close to his head. “I was melting.”

“I threw him in,” Justin offers. Nathan shakes his head slowly, squinting in disbelief.

“Whatthefuckever,” he announces after a moment. “Party’s over. Get out.”

“Do we have to?” Trevor asks from where he’s dog-paddling circles around Justin.

“Actually, I want in,” Hayden announces from beside Nathan, then immediately starts to strip. Warren takes the moment to wonder why he keeps getting involved in late-night pool sessions with half-naked teenagers. “Look out!” Hayden says, just before he’s doing a cannon ball in. Warren’s whole body rocks with the waves it creates in the pool, and Hayden’s already cackling when he surfaces. When Warren looks back, Nathan is gone.

“Where did he go?” Warren asks before he can really think about what it is he’s saying.

“Bathroom, joint,” Hayden answers him, from much closer than he’d been a second ago. He surprises Warren by ducking down and grabbing him around the legs, flipping him over his shoulder and backwards into the water. Warren splutters when he comes back up.

From there, it’s just a mess of rough-housing and water-loss from the pool. Nathan’s back and watching them from the sidelines by the time Warren’s lungs scream for a time-out. Warren pulls himself out and sits on the edge, giving Nathan a wave he doesn’t return.

“You look like a wet dog,” Nathan comments. Warren ignores it.

“It’s a bloodbath in there. How does he have so much energy this late at night?”

“Speed,” Nathan answers nonchalantly and, yeah, that makes sense. Warren should have guessed. “He’s been riding it all night.”

Was that normal? What was the lifespan of that kind of stuff? Warren knew the side-effects and lifelong risks, but that was about the extent of his drug culture. Thanks, public education.

“He’s making me tired just watching him.”

“Do you want some?” Nathan asks, and when Warren looks up he looks genuinely curious. His eyebrows, usually set closer together in a negative expression of some sort, are relaxed. His whole face is relaxed. Definitely stoned.

“Uh, no,” Warren says quickly. Nathan shrugs.

“Suit yourself. Did Hayden do that?” Using the toe of his shoe, Nathan probes a spot on Warren’s side. When Warren looks to see what he means, he realizes the area is a deep red.

“That’s going to bruise,” he mutters, pushing Nathan’s shoe away and pulling on the skin to look at it. It’s likely there are more like that elsewhere on his body. He wasn’t much for physical entertainment.

“You’re bleeding.”

“What?” Warren twists around, looks at his hands, his arms, his chest. “Where?”

Nathan crouches down and grabs Warren’s chin, turning his head and probing Warren’s lip with the thumb of his opposite hand. It comes away red with blood.

“Aw, shit.” Warren sticks his tongue out and, sure enough, detects a coppery taste beneath all the chlorine. He scrubs the area with the heel of his hand.

“Gross,” Nathan comments, still holding Warren’s chin. “You look like The Joker.”

Great. His face must not have been wet enough to dilute the blood when he did that, so it smeared right on his skin. At least Nathan was speaking his language. Nathan releases him as Warren moves to stand up, grimacing at how awful wet jeans feel.

“Where are you going?” Nathan asks.

“Bathroom. Toilet paper.”

“None left.”

Warren groans. Seriously? “I hate parties,” he mutters, then, louder, “Alright. I’m going back, then.”

“Good. Party is over.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Trying to ignore the wetness of his soggy jeans, Warren collects his belongings, throws one last look at the pool, where Hayden has Trevor in a headlock, and heads out of the gym. When he reaches the outside, he nearly releases a very high-pitched, very girly scream.

“Fuck, it’s cold!” he half-screeches, curling in on himself just outside the building. His pants were his worst enemy right now, and he wanted to take them off _immediately_.

“Yeah. Almost November.”

Warren startles, then looks to find Nathan just behind him, standing there idly with his hands in his pockets.

“What are you doing?” Warren asks.

“Leaving.”

“Can you do that?”

Nathan shrugs. “Don’t care.”

Well. Okay, then. No point in arguing that.

Warren decides it’s best to just leave Nathan to his own devices and prepares himself to sprint to the dorms. After some serious pep-talking in his head and a count of three, he goes for it, and subsequently regrets all the choices he made that day, all the way to the entrance to the dorms. Once inside, he scurries into the showers, shivering heavily, and throws the shower on hot. When he looks back to the sinks, he’s jump-scared by the fact Nathan is again there, breathing heavier than normal.

He might have screamed.

(He screamed. Just a little bit.)

“Did—did you run here?” Warren asks, clutching his chest like he’s worried his heart’s going to break free. Nathan, mostly unfazed by the short, almost-comedic scream, just looks at Warren like he’s insane.

“ _You_ ran, dumbass,” he says, like that explained everything.

“Uh, yeah, because I’m soaking wet and it’s fucking freezing outside. You’re not even a little wet.”

Nathan looks down at himself and nods. Warren, feeling the heat starting to come from the shower, decides he can deal with Nathan after he’s warmed up, and goes in. He strips out of his wet jeans and boxers while he’s in there, throwing them out the curtain to slap onto the tile floors, and soaks in the heat for a good fifteen minutes. He’d have stayed in longer, but with a second strain of running water filling the room, the water pelting down on him suddenly turns to ice and he shuts the water off with a yelp.

“Nathan!”

“You were taking too long.”

Warren sticks his head out the shower, using the curtain as coverage, and glares at Nathan. He’s standing next to one of the sinks with the water on, running over … are those his clothes? Yeah, Warren realizes when he finds them missing from where he put them, they are. Okay.

“I was going to do that.”

“You’re naked,” Nathan points out.

“After I was done.”

Nathan shrugs. “I did it.”

“Well, yeah, but you didn’t have to.”

Nathan shrugs again, then shuts the water off and digs in the pile of fabric occupying the sink. Warren watches him, wondering what it is exactly that he’s doing, then understands a second later when Nathan’s launching Warren’s underwear across the bathroom. Warren just barely makes the catch.

“Stop being naked,” Nathan tells him, and Warren can only make a noise that he hopes conveys his annoyance before doing just that. When Warren comes out, he starts the process of wringing the water out of his jeans. His shirts and socks remain forgotten on the floor. Nathan continues to watch him from where he’s leaned against one of the walls, seemingly content not to be doing anything else.

Warren sighs, suddenly feeling the weight of tired the night has made him. “Shouldn’t you be with Victoria right now? Usually you’re with her after the social gatherings that involve drugs.”

“She’s busy right now.”

Warren tries to think back to the party. Did he notice Victoria leave? She was at the party, he remembered that much, but she wasn’t there when the pool incident started. “Busy?”

“Victoria’s been experimenting,” Nathan admits. Embarrassingly, in his exhaustion it takes Warren a second to realize Nathan’s not talking about science.

“New drugs?” Warren guesses while wringing the water from his jeans.

“Girls.”

Warren feels his eyebrows shoot up in surprise before he can reign them in. “Oh,” he says plainly. Nathan starts tapping his heel against the tiles of the floor. “YOLO?” he suggests, then winces, declaring that to be a product of his fatigue.

Nathan just snorts. “Says the walking contradiction to that statement.”

Point. Even if it was only kind of true.

Oh, wait. Wait a minute.

“Is that why you got so pissed off before?” Warren asks, the puzzle pieces in his brain suddenly slotting together and giving him more of the potential picture. Nathan gives him a blank look. “When I told you to stop calling Chloe and Max dykes,” Warren clarifies for him.

“Oh. When you thought I was going to kiss you,” Nathan says simply, then nods. “Shut you up good.”

“Dude, you got way up in my bubble. I could have counted your teeth if I wanted to. Take me out to dinner first next time if you’re going to pull that kind of shit.”

Nathan cocks his head. “Why? Want your first kiss to be a winner, princess?”

Warren wants to get angry at the assumption, but it’s too easy of one. He knew Nathan would assume that, and he was too tired, anyway, to do more than let out a breath through his nose. “Oh, ye of little faith.”

Nathan snorts. “Almost punched you instead, then thought the shock factor would work better to get my point across.”

“Wow,” Warren mutters, “guess you did make the point.”

“Heat of the moment.”

“Remind me never to play gay chicken with you.”

A lapse of silence falls between them. “That had something to do with it,” Nathan confirms. Warren has to backtrack to realize what he’s talking about. Man, swimming was exhausting. “Made me mad, because I’d never treat Vic like that.”

“Yeah,” Warren says, bending to toss his socks in the sink and rinse them of their chlorine water, “that seems to be a reoccurring theme.”

“Hey,” Nathan says angrily—or, kind of. Not in his usual angry way. It was a different anger. Nathan was a complex specimen with varying shades of ire. “Victoria has done a lot for me, for a long time. She didn’t judge me where the rest of you fuckers did.”

Warren lifts his hands up. “Whoa, I didn’t say I had a problem with it. Yeah, I’d prefer it if you didn’t go full asshole on my friends that also happen to be your friends sometimes, but I’m not upset you _don’t_ treat her—er, like us.” It showed he could be a good, loyal person, if anything. Maybe not necessarily to Warren, but to someone, and that kept him from being solely self-driven, like so many people whispered him to be.

Nathan continues to watch Warren with narrowed eyes. “I’m fine with how you treat me when you’re not doing it to hurt me,” Warren tells him slowly. “It’s not like I expected otherwise.”

This makes Nathan frown, but if he was going to do anything more, he’s stopped when a slow shuffling sound suddenly comes from the hallway, followed almost immediately by someone entering the showers. It’s a guy Warren has seen around campus, but, despite school being in session for the past two months, has never actually met. He’s obviously half-asleep—not only his walk gives him away, but he blinks blankly at Warren, taking in his lack of clothing and overall wetness in confusion, then looks over to Nathan and scowls. Nathan looks to the side, like he’s pretending the guy doesn’t exist.

“Whatever he’s payin’ you,” the guy says at Warren after he’s seemed to have time to process, his voice sleep-gruff and his speech slow, “it’s not enough. Go back home.”

Nathan’s head whips in the guy’s direction, his body picking up from the tile wall in an instant fighting stance. “The _fuck_ did you just say?”

Warren, despite his brainy attributes, has absolutely no fucking clue what was happening.

The guy looks at Nathan warily. “You can’t bring your lackeys into the dorms like this. You’re not above the school’s rules, Prescott.”

“Hah!” Nathan barks, and it’s like he’s completely sober. Warren jumps, the sharp sound echoing off the walls of the bathroom. “I _am_ the school’s rules, bitch. I make this shit town; this school is mine!”

The guy takes a step back.

“Um,” Warren interjects before someone can start something serious. They both turn to look at him. “I go here?”

The guy frowns, then squints at Warren. Didn’t he normally wear glasses?

“I don’t recognize you,” he says.

“I’m Warren,” Warren tries weakly. “Warren Graham? Room one-oh-nine?”

The guy just continues to look at him in confusion, then finally shrugs. “I’m not awake enough for this shit,” he says, then, rubbing his eye, turns and shuffles back out the door.

Warren and Nathan watch him go, Warren with one hand on Nathan’s arm, afraid he might try to follow.

“Who the hell was that?” Nathan asks once he’s gone.

“No idea. I thought you’d know him. He knew you.”

“Everyone knows me. I’m infamous, comes with the name.”

Warren releases Nathan’s arm. “He didn’t seem to like you much,” Warren says, taking his wrung-out jeans. They were still so wet, but that was denim for you.

“Comes with the name,” Nathan repeats, and something in his tone makes Warren decide that subject should be closed.

Grimacing, Warren sticks his legs in and pulls his wet jeans up. No, wet denim was far from a favorite feeling of his, that was for sure. He glances over at Nathan as he’s picking his shirts up, wondering why he’s so quiet, then realizes Nathan’s busy looking at his phone.

“What time is it?” Warren asks, even though his own phone is right by the sink.

“Almost two,” Nathan replies without looking up. Warren pulls up the mental schedule of vampire movies he’d made when Max had told him what was going to be playing when. _Shadow of the Vampire_? Yeah, that sounded right, that should be the one playing now.

“Are you going to bed?”

Nathan makes a noise, but Warren can’t tell if it’s a scoff or a thoughtful noise. “Nope.”

“You wanna watch a movie with me? _Black Sunday_? Old classic.”

Nathan takes his time with his answer, tapping away at the screen of his phone. Warren’s debating putting his damp socks back on for the trek back to his room instead of his shoes when he answers, “As long as it’s in my room.”

On that sweet projector of his? Oh, _hell_ yes. Don’t have to ask Warren twice.

“Deal,” he says, grinning. “I’ll bring the popcorn.”

 

* * *

 

He brings the popcorn, and Nathan’s already downing a beer when Warren slides in, bag in hand. He rejects the offer when Nathan holds one up in question, then settles on the couch and gets comfortable. Nathan throws himself onto the other end and sprawls out once the movie’s set up and playing. Warren gives the movie most of his attention as it plays, but he does notice Nathan splitting his attention between the movie and his phone. If it were anyone but Nathan, he’d make a comment about it, but he’s too tired to incite the potential battle it might bring about.

Really, he’s too tired to be doing much of anything right now. Why had he thought this was a good idea? He should have asked to watch it tomorrow night.

Warren shifts the popcorn bag in his lap (Nathan didn’t want it on the couch, and _he_ wasn’t going to hold it), then shifts his position when it doesn’t wake him up enough to keep his vision from blurring.

The last thing he remembers is going in for a handful of the popcorn only to find the bag gone, and then there’s nothing.


	2. Ghosts

_Freezing rain pelting against his face, roaring winds screaming in his ears. People scrambling and panicking and running for their lives. They had been warned and they had ignored. Now, they had no escape._

_Warren can’t hear, he can’t see. He can’t breathe._

_This wasn’t right. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be._

_This wasn’t the same._

_Why wasn’t this the same?_

_It’s cold inside, the air is wild, and Warren knows he has to stay where he is. Because he can’t go somewhere else. Because if he does, something might go wrong. If something goes wrong, it might be the end. He wasn’t ready for the end._

_This isn’t where he’s supposed to be._

_This isn’t the same._

_He wasn’t ready._

_Not the end._

Not the end. He wasn’t ready. Not yet.

This isn’t the same. This isn’t right.

_This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!_

The train hits him, and he screams.

 

* * *

 

When Warren wakes up, his heart is jackhammering in his chest, filling up his ears with the noise of its drumming. It’s dark, wherever he is, and he can’t see anything. There are too many bursts of white against his vision to see anyway. He can’t stop gulping down air. He doesn’t know where he is.

Something is pushing him. No—holding him. There are hands gripping his arms to his sides at the very top, right before they turn to shoulder. The grip is tight, almost painful, and one side is released when he rushes his hand up and grapples at it with a sweaty grip. He can feel the hand clench into a fist, but it doesn’t pull away.

Max?

“ _Breathe_ ,” he hears as his heartbeat starts to slow and the pounding in his ears starts to lessen, allowing him to hear again. The spots fade, slowly, and Warren is able to pick out parts of a face. A sharp nose, pale eyebrows on a wrinkled brow, lips turned in a scowl that Warren knew better than the back of his own hand. Not Max. “Fuck, Warren. Hey. Slow down, you’re awake. Breathe.”

Nathan.

He was in Nathan’s room, Warren realizes as the previous night floods back into his memory all at once. With it comes soothing, instantaneous relief, and he sags back against the couch bonelessly, releasing all the air he had trapped in his lungs. Nathan’s hands follow, even when Warren releases the grip he had on the one.

“Nightmare,” he croaks with a mouth that feels like it’s filled with cotton.

A real nightmare. Not the farce of one. Not another time loop. He was still going forward, not back. The storm wasn’t coming. It had already gone.

Shit.

“Yeah,” Nathan says. His voice is low—not quite a whisper, but not exactly a normal volume. Warren takes another deep breath. “I managed to come to that conclusion.”

Warren looks to the projector—it’s turned off. That’s why it’s so damn dark. The blackout curtains are shut tight. Does Nathan ever let light into his room that isn’t artificial?

“What time is it?” Warren asks, then grabs the hand of Nathan’s that’s still gripping his shoulder way too hard. “I’m okay, really,” he insists.

Nathan doesn’t look convinced. Warren thinks he might have woken Nathan up from his disgruntled appearance, not unlike the time when he had first knocked on Nathan’s door. Or the second time—which was Nathan’s first. Because the first time wasn’t in this loop.

Loop.

Timeline. Reality? There were no more loops. This was it, and this was … real? But that didn’t make the parts that were erased fake, did it?

God.

“You don’t look okay.” Nathan’s voice stirs Warren from his mind, and Warren kneads a knuckle into his eye to try and mask the fact he was lapsing into his periodic existential crises.

“Sorry,” Warren mutters. “Tired. Nightmares fuck me up, but I really am okay. I swear.”

Nathan leans back from where he’d been looming over Warren, still clearly unconvinced. “Was it the storm?”

Warren nods, seeing no reason to beat around that bush. What else would it have been? Nathan’s frown deepens, but he doesn’t say anything. He stands up from where he’d been kneeling beside the couch and vanishes from Warren’s view. Instead of watching him, Warren digs around for his phone to find the time.

Nine. He’d slept about six hours? That sounded right. Max had also continued texting him, but he’d get around to answering those later, since she was probably asleep herself after a night of awesome vampire goodness. Warren hadn’t even stayed conscious enough to finish the movie. He drops his phone onto his chest with a sigh and throws his arm over his eyes.

“Are you going back to sleep?” Nathan asks. Warren shifts his arm to find him looking down at him.

“Nah. Never can fall back to sleep after those.”

“You have them a lot?”

“Not anymore.”

This isn’t what Nathan wanted to hear, apparently, because now he looks angry at Warren. “You had them a lot before?”

“Uh,” Warren starts, pulling himself up into a sitting position. “I mean, yeah. Especially right after the loop was broken. I was never sure if I’d wake up and find myself back in it. I think nightmares are a pretty normal reaction to something like that.”

“You never told me.”

Warren just stares at Nathan, who’s looking more upset by the minute. “Um, yeah, because you were busy _trying not to go to jail_. Nightmares aren’t nearly as important as reality.”

“You should have told me,” Nathan insists.

Now Warren’s starting to get upset.  “Why? What could you have done? They’re nightmares, dude, from an incident in my life that I will always question myself about the authenticity of.” He could talk to Max about this because, even though she didn’t live the loops, she’d had her time powers, and she was able to help him when he started to question if he hadn’t just lost his marbles for a while there. Nathan, though? That was a different story.

Nathan is pissed. “I would have wanted to fucking know. I _do_ want to fucking know.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll tell you about that shit, if that’s what you really want. I don’t get why you want to know so badly, though. It’s just extra annoyances on you.”

“Oh, I don’t fucking know, Graham,” Nathan says. “Maybe because I’ve spent my whole life dealing with the idea of questioning the legitimacy of things going on in my head? But what do _I_ know about that kind of shit, right? Man, mental illness. What an _enigma_.”

Warren winces, because that was a good point. A very good point.

“Oh,” Warren says after a moment. Nathan just glares at him. The silence lapses between them like a thick blanket, and Warren only feels worse the longer it lasts. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I really just didn’t want to add onto your problems when you already had hell to deal with.” And he’d known what it was like to have problems at the worst of times. He didn’t wish that on anyone.

Nathan makes a noise, somewhere between annoyance and mocking. “You’ve been my problem since you nearly broke down my door and told me to get my head out of my ass before I ruined my entire life.”

Another good point.

“Doesn’t mean I wanted to keep being one,” Warren asserts.

“Should have asked me before you went and made decisions for me,” Nathan says harshly, and finally Warren starts to catch on. He had taken control of something Nathan had wanted to decide for himself, and Warren knew Nathan didn’t answer well to having his life controlled more than it already was. “I don’t do one-sided transactions,” Nathan continues when Warren just looks at him. “If you’re going to help me, I’m going to help you.”

“I don’t help you, though,” Warren says. “Not anymore.”

Nathan gives him a patronizing look. “You’re a moron, Graham,” he says slowly, then, after shaking his head, “Get up. I’m hungry.”

Warren blinks, the sudden halt from the argument jarring. “But—”

“Shut up. Conversation is done. Two Whales, bitch, chop chop.”

Warren has no choice but to get up from the couch and follow Nathan’s demands, because each time he tries to do otherwise, Nathan shuts him down. He doesn’t even let Warren get a word in edgewise until he’s back in his own room and Nathan’s barging in, fully dressed in warm clothes, before Warren even has his shirt on.

“How do you do that so fast?” Warren exclaims, yanking his sweatshirt of choice for the day over his head.

“Efficiency,” Nathan responds as he opens Warren’s Under the Dome copy that he’d been reading yesterday and replaces the photo he’d used as a bookmark with a sticky-note taken from Warren’s desk. Warren just catches sight of it before Nathan shoves it in his pocket—it was a photo Max had taken of Warren while he was in a fierce session of WoW, the one where he’s gnawing on his lip and only illuminated by the glow of his computer. He had been too in-the-zone to notice her taking it, and she had claimed that’s why she took it.

Warren’s phone going off distracts him from his thoughts, and he forgets about the picture completely as he goes to see who it is.

“Max and Chloe are going to the diner,” Warren announces, and Nathan scowls.

“You have got to be fucking with me. Can I go anywhere without running into the Dyke Duo?”

“Nathan,” Warren warns, but Nathan only rolls his eyes.

“Not going to call them that to their face,” he declares, like he’s giving in to Warren’s demands. “Today,” he mutters, then turns to grab the door handle.

“I heard that!” Warren calls, but Nathan’s already out the door. 

 

* * *

 

They’re the first ones there, and Nathan makes a point of muttering something rude under his breath as he crams his keys into his pocket (because he’d refused to even touch Warren’s car, and one too many arguments over it meant Warren didn’t protest every single time anymore) before slumping into the booth next to Warren.

“I said they’d be here,” Warren retaliates, flipping a menu open like he was planning on ordering something different for a change. “I didn’t say when.”

Nathan’s eyes roll so hard, Warren wonders if one day they’re going to fall right out of his skull. That would be pretty cool, considering it’s physically impossible. Also, horrifying, but still pretty damn cool.

Nathan doesn’t touch his menu, but his arm stretches across Warren’s personal bubble to snap up a packet of sugar, which his fingers proceed to rip open and spill into a small pile at their table. Warren used to make comments on the small messes Nathan created whenever he was idle, but it never got him anywhere, so he stopped trying and let Nathan do what he wanted, not unlike most other situations between the two. Now, he just grumbles something about the arm in his face and proceeds to ignore the rest.

“You better be cleaning that up when you’re through,” Joyce calls as she’s approaching the table. Warren looks up at her to see both her eyebrows raised as she looks between them, and he realizes it’s because he and Nathan are sharing one side of the booth.

“Waiting on Max and Chloe,” he tells her quickly, and, just as he finishes speaking, the front door chimes open and Chloe’s blue head is walking through, followed by what he assumes is Max, though he can’t see her yet.

“I’ll grab y’all your coffee,” Joyce tells them in mild exasperation, then walks away from the table with only a look spared at her daughter as they pass.

“Hello to you too, Mother!” Chloe calls, but Joyce doesn’t react. Max walks around her with a look of amused acceptance at Chloe’s display. They were all used to it at this point, why bother interfering? With her hands braced on the table, Max slides into the opposite booth and nods to Warren in greeting. Warren smiles back, and Max’s eyes widen.

“Warren,” Max says in surprise, leaning across the table to squint at him as Chloe drops in next to her. “Your lip!”

“Nice,” Chloe drawls, “making out with a shark?”

Warren blinks in surprise and reaches up to finger his lip before he can think to catch himself. “Oh,” he says, “no, I bit my lip.”

“It looks like it was bleeding,” says Max.

“It was.” Warren shrugs. “I bit it pretty hard.”

“Doing _what_?”

Uh oh. He should have known Chloe would want answers immediately, but he hadn’t really thought he’d need to think up false ones this soon in the game. Chloe was around a lot, sure, but Warren didn’t really see her enough for her to initiate interrogation on him. After Vampire Night had been cancelled for him, he’d decided not to bother thinking of a reason, and, well, here he was now.

“Uh,” he stutters, trying to think fast. Next to him, Nathan’s swirling his sugar in a small spiral on the table, and Warren can swear he sees a smirk. “Ran into a door?”

Max frowns at him. “How did you run into a door?”

“Well, you see, doors have these things on them called hinges, which allow them to move in place. Often, this allows one to close off a room to keep things like bugs and unwanted visitors, but, on occasion, can also turn on those seeking entrance or exit from a room that—”

“O- _kay_ , time to shut our pie-holes,” Chloe announces with a clap of her hands just as Joyce is coming back with a steaming pot of dark brown brew. “Momma needs some coffee in her veins before she can deal with Bill Nye over here.”

“Momma’s only having one cup if she’s got this much energy already,” Joyce admonishes, dishing out the cups to the four of them and starting her rounds of pouring. Chloe huffs, slumping in her seat and crossing her arms. Warren notices the sugar’s been pushed back into a pile when he glances down to watch Joyce pour his coffee, and he hopes Nathan doesn’t plan on using it after playing with it, because _ew_.

“Oh, honey,” Joyce says suddenly, bringing everyone’s attention at the table onto her as she sets the coffee pot down and gingerly reaches her fingertips out to hover in the direction of Warren’s neck, just above the collar of his sweatshirt. “Did one of those brutes in that school do this to you? Bullying, in this day and age. You think they’d have found better ways to keep it from happening!”

The flush that crawls up Warren’s neck is swift and engulfing; he can feel his face radiating with the heat it brings. He smacks a hand over his neck, but the damage is done, even after Joyce pulls her hand back with the click of her tongue. Everyone is staring at Warren now—even Nathan. Like he didn’t know what it was Joyce was tutting about.

“No,” Warren splutters, “it’s not like that. I was roughhousing. No one— There was no bullying. Guy stuff, y’know?”

Joyce looks completely unconvinced, and the resemblance to her daughter, seated diagonal to Warren, is momentarily striking. Take-no-bullshit ran in the genes, apparently. But Joyce only sighs and picks the coffee pot back up, telling them their food (which they hadn’t ordered yet—she knew them far too well by now, obviously) would be out soon before moving to another table. Warren watches her go out of the corner of his eye, then looks back to the table with a grimace already set on his face.

“Who kicked your ass, Graham?” Chloe asks immediately.

“Why would someone beat you up?” Max asks before Warren can answer Chloe, craning her neck to get a look at whatever Joyce had pointed out. It was likely a bruise—he’d seen a couple of them on his torso and chest while getting dressed. “Was it one of those assholes on the football team?”

“Why didn’t Prescott here keep it from happening?” Chloe asks right after, directing her sharp eyes onto Nathan, who’s slumped in his seat and simmering over something. Life, maybe, or something Warren didn’t want to know about. Not an unusual occurrence, as Warren’s learned over time. That was just Nathan for you.

Nathan’s head snaps up at the accusation, and the hand he has flat on the table clenches into a fist immediately. “When the fuck did this become my issue?” Nathan retorts, sitting up in his seat. “I’m not some babysitter, if you want the kid to have a bodyguard, pay for one!”

“Hey!” Warren cuts in, louder than he means to, and some of the other patrons look to their table curiously. Warren ducks his head in embarrassment. He might have learned to catch on to when his interference was needed before a Nathan-esque blow up could happen, but he needed to work on his execution. “Nathan, don’t be a dick. You were there, they’re just from Hayden. Not from beating me up!” he insists when Max gives him a look of alarm and Chloe nearly jumps in her seat with want for conflict written on her face. Jeez, was she always looking for a fight? “I was telling the truth. We were roughhousing in the pool and, well, Hayden’s a big guy and a jock, and I’m skinny and bruise like a Georgia peach.”

“Southern belle,” Nathan mutters. Warren ignores him.

“I swear,” Warren says, his hands up as if physically warding the two girls off. “Really. No one beat me up, we were just fucking around.”

After a moment of apprehension, Chloe slumps down in her seat, and Max leans back with a sigh. “Way to be a typical nerd, Cracker,” Chloe mutters in disappointment.

“Cracker?” Max asks. Warren’s relieved to note she seems to have moved on from the previous subject already, only smarting a little over the fact she let it go so fast. It was for the better. And he was over her, really.

Really. He was.

(Mostly.)

“Yeah, you know. Like Graham Cracker?” Chloe shrugs. “He’s a little sweet and a little salty, and a whole lotta crumbly. Graham Cracker.”

Warren frowns, feeling slightly insulted now that the nickname was actually explained to him. “Are you calling me a flake?” She hadn’t used the nickname since the Vortex Club party the day they captured Jefferson, but he hadn’t really given the name much thought at the time, too concerned with everything happening at the time to bother, and it had been forgotten completely in the aftermath.

“No, no way,” Chloe protests without hesitation. “You’re just, you know. Crumbly. Little mushy when wet. Stop analyzing my nicknames, okay, I do it with affection.”

Max smiles and rolls her eyes. “That’s how you know you’re on her good side, she gives you hella crappy nicknames that are really partial insults.”

“Better than ‘kid’, I guess,” Warren mumbles, receiving snorts from all three party members for his efforts. Yeah, something tells him that name isn’t going away anytime soon. Figures. “Shouldn’t Nathan be ‘Cracker’, though?”

Blank stares meet his question. Even Nathan doesn’t look like he understands when Warren glances at him. “I mean, yeah, my last name is Graham, but he’s the one from Florida,” Warren tries.

“Oh, I get it,” Nathan says, then, when both Max and Chloe still look confused, “Florida Cracker. That’s what they call it when you’re born there?”

“That sounds vaguely discriminatory,” says Max.

Nathan shrugs. “Not my nickname.”

“Yeah, for once I have to agree with Prickscott,” Chloe says. “Cracker is still yours, Warren. Prickscott stays Prickscott, it’s just too ingrained into who he is as a person to be taken away now.”

“I can just _feel_ the love,” Nathan bites back. Chloe gives him a wicked smile, and Warren just exchanges looks of exasperation with Max as their friends hold a heated silence between them. It’s not urgent enough to require intervention, so they leave them to their silent simmering until Joyce comes back with plates of food for everyone. Warren accidentally catches her gaze when she sets his down in front of him, and he can tell from the look in her eye that she wanted to have a Mom Talk with him. Would she actually attempt to remained to be the question, but Warren decides as he’s shoveling his waffle in his mouth that he was going to adhere to Nathan’s side until he was out of Joyce’s range. That way, at least, if she did stop him and try to talk to him, Nathan would likely stick around whether he was wanted or not and potentially call witness to the truth.

Well … hopefully. If the one time he listened to authority ended up being when Joyce told him to leave, Warren wouldn’t be all that surprised. Nathan’s almost a completely different person when Joyce is talking to him—which blows Warren’s mind repeatedly, because honest-to-god _manners_ were involved.

Who would have guessed Nathan _had_ manners? Much less knew how to use them?

Though, he didn’t use them when Max and Chloe were present, for obvious reasons, but that didn’t mean he was rude to Joyce. Quiet was a better way of putting it, because he barely said a word to her even as she tried to converse with them and ask them about their days. It never seemed to bother her, but maybe, somehow, she didn’t know who Nathan was away from the diner.

Warren frowns into his cup of coffee. Why was he analyzing this? This wasn’t some social or science experiment that needed his rapt analytical attention, and this wasn’t a loop where he had to pay all the attention he could to get out. Nathan was right—Warren really needed to stop automatically overanalyzing everything that happened to him.

“You okay, Warren?” Max’s voice brings Warren back, and he looks up from his cup to find her looking at him with concern. He doesn’t miss the slight apprehension in her gaze. “You were, like, drinking that for a solid minute.”

“Sorry,” Warren replies, setting his cup down with a sheepish smile. “Sometimes I still lapse into creepy prolonged silence. I’m just zoning out and thinking too hard about shit.”

Max’s lips purse. Next to her, Chloe’s mouth turns down in a frown, her brow furrowing. “Thinking about Jefferson?” Chloe, sans tact, asks nonchalantly.

Both Nathan and Max tense up, but it’s not because of the mention of Jefferson. Not exactly. They both know from experience that, if anything, it wasn’t _Jefferson_ Warren was spacing-out over. It never was.

“Could say that,” Warren mutters. Not for the first time, Chloe reminds them that she was the only one who didn’t know about Warren’s time loops. Not for the first time, the fact sends a wave of guilt over Warren. He knows Max feels the same, but he doesn’t know why Nathan’s reacting the way he is. Maybe the mention of Jefferson _was_ the reason, or maybe it was the associated time loops that Warren usually was caught thinking about … but Warren, dammit, was _not_ going to delve back into analyzing it. It he absolutely had to, he’d bring it up with Nathan later.

“He’s behind bars,” Chloe assures Warren. He feels her foot gently kick him from beneath the table. “Good as gone. Bastard isn’t coming back.”

Shit. The guilt is going to drown him. He should have told her the whole truth that night in the car. Or, at least, some of it. She deserved that.

Warren gives her a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, the lie behind it churning amongst the guilt it bred.

 _Is it too late to tell her?_ Warren thinks to himself once he’s released back to his waffle. There was no redoing it if it was the wrong choice—Max’s powers were completely gone, and his loop, thank god, was stable. Everything that happened now was permanent, but … Chloe should know. Something in Warren was assuring him it was the right thing to do.

Never mind the fact his instincts hadn’t been all that useful in the past, even when they were needed most. _Sometimes_ they were right. And sometimes they just … pushed him in the right direction. This was probably one of those times.

He just had to figure out the best time to do it. Maybe talking to Max about it first would be in his best interests. She knew Chloe better than he did, after all. She’d know how to handle breaking that kind of information to her.

When they’re finished eating, Chloe makes some comment about Thanksgiving Break that Warren doesn’t catch, but is probably intended for Max anyway. Max replies with something along the lines of agreeing to stay at Blackwell while Warren digs his wallet out, and then Nathan’s hand is grabbing Warren’s wrist under the table just as he’s relinquishing his pocket of said wallet’s presence. Warren gives him a weird look, which Nathan ignores in favor of getting his own wallet out and slapping a bill on the table between his and Warren’s plates.

God dammit.

“Nathan,” Warren hisses as soon as Chloe and Max have vacated the table and are heading towards the door. “Mind telling me when you decided to become my Sugar Daddy?”

Nathan’s eyebrows go up, and his head lilts in the way that warns Warren that he’s about to be a smartass. “Are you offering to suck my dick for breakfast?”

Warren _would_ have been able to keep a straight face for that one, had Officer Berry not been sitting at the bar just behind Nathan and dropped his coffee mug with a choked noise as soon as the words left Nathan’s mouth. No, Berry had heard every word, and the look Warren gives him is pure mortification when he turns around and looks at Warren over Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan, unperturbed, waltzes out of the diner and leaves Warren abandoned in the booth. Warren scrambles out after him, and Joyce, too busy with the broken mug issue, doesn’t even seem to notice him leave.

“Where are you going?” Warren calls the moment he realizes Nathan wasn’t heading in the direction of the parking lot. Warren watches him as he crosses the road instead, not bothering to look for cars before doing so. Warren knows Nathan can hear him, but Nathan ignores him anyway.

With a groan and a lack of want for waiting for either Nathan to return or the bus to come, Warren follows. Just like Nathan probably knew he would. He checks for cars first, though, because he’s experienced enough dying in his life to keep him from wanting to repeat the experience again anytime soon. Especially if it meant he couldn’t come back to life after. He finds Nathan traipsing along the shoreline once he crosses, which is exactly no surprise to anyone.

Warren doesn’t pretend to understand Nathan’s obsession with the beach—he just curls himself in closer to the warmth of his jacket and pushes through the chilling breezes the beach offers, doing his best not to sprawl in the sand at any point (his balance was still shit, and he didn’t know if that was the loop or his own lack of equilibrium talking), because getting sand out of every crevice it always managed to find was a _bitch_.

“Nathan,” Warren tries again, hands deep in his pockets. How was Nathan not freezing? All he was wearing was a button-up shirt of some kind and a sweater. That couldn’t have been as warm as Warren’s ensemble, and _he_ was cold. “ _Nathan_ ,” Warren pushes when Nathan doesn’t react, and this time he only gives Warren a glance over his shoulder.

Alright, fine. Warren could enjoy the beach on this cold day. Easy. No problem here.

Warren promptly sneezes, and his nose immediately starts running.

“Aw, come on.” Warren didn’t have a tissue. Or a napkin. Or anything but his sleeve. He wasn’t prepared for the great outdoors, he lived the life of a prestigious hermit, only venturing out when the call of science goaded him. All the nature he needed he could find pixelated in one of many games of his choosing. Why prepare for something like this?

Well, whatever. Sleeve it is.

With the motion of wiping his nose with his arm, though, comes a sudden inky darkness that encroaches on the edges of his vision.

“Whoa.” Warren pulls his arm away and blinks rapidly, the gas station beyond encircled in a ring of hazy black. It fades with each blink, and is soon gone, but it leaves Warren unsettled.

Was he getting sick already? He really hopes this doesn’t mean he’s going to black out. That wouldn’t be fun.

He should probably tell Nathan, though. Just in case.

When Warren looks out to locate Nathan, however, Nathan’s already there, and the sudden surprise strikes him and sends him reeling. Mentally, not physically, but it has him stumbling back a step all the same as if he’d been shoved, and something flashes in his mind. Beside him, Nathan snickers, understanding himself as the cause of Warren’s stumble, but Warren’s attention suddenly focused elsewhere. His mind goes fuzzy with confusion, eyes flickering around the expanse of water as if it could help him fully form whatever vague consciousness had pinged in his mind. Then, all at once, he understands as if he had known all along.

 _“The whales_ ,” he murmurs in disbelief. Nathan turns his head to look at him.

“Whales?”

Belatedly, Warren shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says distantly, because how could he possibly explain all that right now? But he knows Nathan can tell he’s lying, because he only narrows his eyes instead of turning away. Warren scrubs a hand over his face, trying to rid himself of the niggling realization until he could really think on it later, alone, but that proves to be a mistake. When he opens his eyes again, the whales are there.

Beached, baking in the sun, souring the air with the stench of rot and decay.

Dead.

Very, very dead.

With a cry of horror, Warren jolts backwards, tripping over his own feet, and hits the sand hard in his scramble to get away. But just as suddenly as they had come, Warren wrenches his eyes back open from where they’d closed on impact and the whales are gone, and he’s sitting on the clear beach of Arcadia Bay, pulling cold air into his lungs like he’d just been drowning in the water. His head snaps in different directions as he tries to understand what’s happened, but there’s nothing there. Nothing but Nathan, who’s now on his knees and shaking Warren by one of his arms, clenched in a grip that hurts.

“Graham?” Warren hears Nathan saying, but it doesn’t really register at first. Nathan tugs hard on Warren’s arm, vying for his attention. “Warren, _hey_!”

Finally, Warren looks at him, and Nathan’s eyes are wild with confusion.

“I—” he tries, but nothing more comes. His heart thunders in his chest, sending his breath racing through his lungs, and he breaks eye contact with Nathan to frantically scour the stretch of beach again despite knowing there wasn’t really anything there.

“ _Warren_ ,” Nathan hisses, and suddenly Warren’s face is wrenched back to Nathan, held in place by hands that encompass his head like they’re about to crush it in one clench. Warren flinches and his hand snaps around Nathan’s wrist without him thinking. “What the _fuck_ was that?” Nathan pushes.

Warren stares at him open-mouthed, his breathing shocked into slowing down, and he blinks a few times at the insistence. “Whales,” Warren says again.

“What _about_ them, Graham?”

“They—they died,” Warren rasps out, his eyes straying again. The whales weren’t there; they weren’t. Not anymore.

But why had he seen them? _How_ had he seen them?

Nathan looks at him uncomprehendingly, frustration building in his expression. He shakes his head sharply, his grip on Warren’s skull loosening just a bit. “You gotta elaborate on this shit, I don’t know what the fuck you’re blubbering about.”

“When—” Warren starts, then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. While he’s letting the air out, he feels Nathan’s fingers loosen further, and then drop slowly from Warren’s head to his shoulders. Warren doesn’t remove his hand from where he’d held Nathan’s wrist, but Nathan doesn’t seem to notice. “When the storm was coming, there were—signs,” Warren says slowly.

“The snow and the eclipse,” Nathan says. “Yeah, you already explained that the day you barged into my room like you’d been smoking bath salts and ranted to me about the end of the world.”

“Not the end of the world,” Warren mutters, “just the end of Arcadia Bay.”

Nathan rolls his eyes. “Whatthefuckever. Same difference. Point is, you already explained those and they happened. You never said anything about whales.”

“That’s because I forgot about them.” Rather, he had never thought they were connected, not in the same sense as the things he’d focused on, not so much a warning than a consequence. There were so many strange things happening in the Bay just before the storm had manifested that not much had really stuck in Warren’s mind as signs aside from the snow and the eclipse. Things like Kate’s suicide and Chloe’s death were at the forefront, just in front of the signs, because he needed to stop them from happening. Things he’d considered smaller, non-signs, had been forgotten in the wake of Warren’s scramble. There was only so much he could keep together when he wasn’t even sure if he wasn’t just going insane.

“I never saw them,” he continues. “I only heard about them from people talking. They were covered in tarps by the time I got to the diner, so I didn’t … I’m—I’m pretty sure they died in all the loops, but I didn’t think …” Warren hesitates, taking the moment to gnaw on his lip absentmindedly. “I didn’t think they were one of the signs,” he says finally in defeat.

If he hadn’t been before, Nathan’s definitely frowning now. “We didn’t have that,” he says bluntly. “I didn’t hear anything about dead whales. You mean beached, right?”

“Beached, yeah,” Warren confirms. “Three of them.”

“I’d know if that had happened,” Nathan says. His grip is tight on Warren’s shoulders—but Warren was starting to understand that that was just how Nathan held people.

“The whole town knew when it happened, I just …” Warren trails off. _Had too many other things to worry about?_ he finishes to himself, but something starts to pool in his stomach, and it’s so close to dread that Warren has to cover his mouth to stifle the dry heave that follows. It’s not the hand that held Nathan’s wrist, but he’s too close to Warren not to notice anyway, and his frown deepens as he leans away in alarm.

“How could they have been a sign if we didn’t have them?” Nathan asks slowly, righting himself again. “What did they mean? It had to be connected to something that didn’t happen this time, right?”

Warren shakes his head slowly, then firmly. “The cyclone never came.”

“Yeah,” Nathan responds, misunderstanding. “We got a shitload of rain instead.”

“No, that’s—it _never came_ , Nathan, but we still got the eclipse and the snow. They were signs of the storm. Why did the whales not show up?”

Nathan’s eyes Warren warily, then flick his gaze to the sea. “You’re not saying this isn’t over, are you?”

The dread that had been swirling around in Warren’s gut spreads, fed by the fear that had birthed it being spoken. Warren’s hand clenches tight on Nathan’s wrist, his teeth grinding together to keep from freaking out.

There was no cyclone. The storm was gone.

The time loop had ended, dammit. It was _done_.

It had to be over.

It _had_ to be.

“Jesus fuck, Warren,” Nathan hisses in his ear. Warren’s doubled over, and Nathan’s hands are so tight on Warren’s shoulders that he can feel the pinch of his nails even through the two layers he’s wearing. “Get it together.”

“They had to have meant something else,” Warren hears himself mumble, but at the moment all he’s really thinking is that there’s sand in his shoes and it’s going to be a bitch to get out. Because he didn’t want to think about it not being over yet. He couldn’t. Too much time had passed since the final day of the loop, and he’d lived weeks past the day he couldn’t pass previously. There couldn’t be more to this. He had been _free_. “Something I didn’t think about.”

“What could dead whales mean?”

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”

Nathan purses his lips, looking half-annoyed with Warren and half like he didn’t know what to do with him. “Come on,” he says, and he’s hauling Warren to his feet with an arm snaked around Warren’s back. “No point in staying here if all it’s going to do is show you dead things. Got plenty of that in my room.”

Nathan releases Warren as soon as he’s on his feet, but Warren can see Nathan watching him the entire time they walk back across the street to the diner’s parking lot. Waiting for sign of another vision—or whatever the hell it had been. Hopefully not a premonition. Even if it meant Warren was just losing his mind, that had to be better than the whole bay being at risk to nature’s brutal wrath all over again.

Warren could handle going insane. For a long time, that’s exactly what he had thought he was doing, rather than reliving the same exact month of his life like some fucked up Warren-esque Groundhog Day. Messy time crap was nowhere near as cool as Doctor Who made it seem to be, but, then again, he couldn’t control _shit_ in his loops. Not at first. Even later on, not really. Warren’s pretty sure a lot of it had been based on luck and a few right choices, because he sure as hell didn’t manage to remember everything he probably should have in order to get out the protagonist way. Not like Max.

But, then, what did that make Warren?

Psychotic, possibly, like he’d initially thought when everything was first happening. Maybe that wasn’t what it had really been at the beginning, but now that everything’s over and done with, maybe he just couldn’t handle the stable flow of time anymore.

(Or maybe it was PTSD, like Nathan thinks it is. Warren doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. It’s not like he can get diagnosed for it—what would he even say?)

Whatever it is, he can handle it. Because that would be so much better than doing it all over again.

Wouldn’t it?

“Tell me about The Flash,” Nathan says once they’re both in the car, turning the key in the ignition and backing out without looking behind him or bucking his seatbelt. Warren doesn’t think to protest.

“What?”

“The Flash, asscake,” Nathan insists. “You keep referencing him to me, so tell me about him.”

Warren blinks. What was Nathan getting at? Whenever Warren tried to talk superheroes, Nathan stopped him and demanded a comic about said superhero instead. He wanted to read about them rather than being told about them, and he was a bitch about spoilers. “Like …” Warren hesitates, “… all of him? His whole story?”

“The whole shebang.” Nathan sits up in his seat, readjusting his position, and then motions at Warren to begin. “Go.”

“Uh. Okay, He—Uh, Well, there’s like twenty or something different Flashes, because you know, gotta pick up the mantle when one dies or vanishes or is kicked out and all that, but the first one was Jay Garrick. He’s not my favorite, I guess, but first Flash is first, so guy’s gotta have his props. He gets his powers one day at work when he …”

Warren rambles on, explaining in fractured attempts at keeping the DC timeline straight, and Nathan doesn’t interrupt him once. He gets so lost in his own explanation that, without Nathan cutting him off to say anything, Warren completely loses track of the time, and they’re back in the school’s parking lot before Warren’s even finished complaining about Jay’s erasure in favor of Barry Allen (whom Warren still liked, but, jeez, DC, _rude_ ). Nathan’s looking at him when Warren stops himself mid-sentence and looks to him in surprise.

“Did you speed here?” Warren asks him in disbelief.

“Probably.”

“I don’t even remember the drive.” Warren scrubs a hand over his mouth, giving Nathan a startled look. “I haven’t rambled like that in, like, for-fucking-ever. The hell. What did you do to me?”

“That was the point,” Nathan responds simply, looking pretty self-satisfied. He turns the engine off, but he doesn’t let go of the wheel or make any move to exit the car.

Warren blinks, then shakes his head slowly. “That was some hella wicked distraction, man. How did you know to do that? How did you even know that would work? I’ve never been able to flat-out distract myself to the point of forgetting my problem before, not since before everything happened. How did you know the way to get me to do that?”

“I told you,” Nathan says quietly, and Warren finds himself automatically searching for the bitter undertone that Nathan so often used when he dropped his voice, but it wasn’t there, “I know a thing or two about distraction methods when it comes to shit going on that other people can’t see or hear.”

Warren presses his lips into a thin line, suddenly unable to avert his gaze despite the want to. Nathan doesn’t look back at Warren; his hand is still on the wheel with a white-knuckled grip and his keys vanish into the fist of the other, but Warren doesn’t know if the tension comes from the fact Warren had doubted him before or from somewhere else.

Nathan had told him about seeing the cyclone, because it had turned out to be one of the real things going on in his head. He rarely talked about anything else, and Warren always knew better than to ask.

The silence between them isn’t as stifled as it had the tendency to be, but Warren is still uncomfortable enough with it to break it before it lasts too long.

“Thank you,” he says earnestly, and Nathan’s grip on the wheel lessens immediately.

“Start listening to me when I tell you I know how to do shit,” Nathan says, but there’s something about the aggression that sounds flimsy to Warren’s ears. Nathan opens his door and slides out of his seat. “And,” he adds on once he’s out of the car, leaning in to give Warren a look, “say ‘hella’ again and I’ll kick your face in so hard you’ll taste designer shoe for the rest of your life.”

Warren scoffs, but doesn’t protest, and he uses the trek back into the dorms to convince Nathan to let him show him the old Flash comics and TV shows, and even talks Nathan into watching some episodes of Smallville, which Warren manages to marvel over even as he’s pulling out his DVD collection to play them, Nathan slumped on his bed and fiddling with one of his collectable figures while waiting.

They end up arguing after every episode about plot points and comparisons to the original content, but it’s the easy arguing—the kind where they’re more harshly debating than actually slinging insults and bitter snipes—that they stick to, and it slowly eases the ball of tension Warren carries in his chest. Victoria doesn’t show up, Hayden doesn’t call. It’s just him and Nathan the entire day, and, to Warren, it’s a soothing comfort he hadn’t known he’d find so easily, in someone he’d never imagined could provide it.

They order Chinese take-out instead of venturing away from the dorms and continue with their superhero debate, and Nathan only leaves Warren’s room once to change and brush his teeth and use the bathroom. Not until much later does it occur to Warren that this was Nathan’s way of making sure he was okay, because somewhere in his mind Nathan is still the Nathan he’s always been, and, despite the fact he’d defend him easily and without hesitation, the fact Nathan looked out for him wasn’t something Warren thought about without skepticism.

That would fade later.

When Nathan returns, Warren’s already started on the next disk of episodes, and Nathan flops onto Warren’s bed with nothing more than a snort at Warren’s greeting statement of, “Watch carefully, because this episode’s about to prove you wrong.”

Despite the ease of that day they spend together in order to push the whales from Warren’s mind, Warren doesn’t sleep the night that follows. But that’s okay, because Nathan doesn’t either.


	3. Confession Hour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this chapter's a little on the shorter side, but it didn't fit well into either chapter two or four, so it stayed its own. Couldn't cut it out, either, because it's actually a super important chapter. Thanks for reading! See you next Thursday ;D

The first day that trails the vision is spent in apprehension, both for Warren and for Nathan, though they handle it vastly differently from one another. Fueled on by a lack of sleep and a large helping of bickering, Warren’s entire being is in knots. He tries his best to act normal, which is easy thanks to his lack of need to socialize given that it’s a weekend, but Nathan is a clear ball of nerves from the moment he leaves Warren’s side to return to his own room in the morning and continued into Warren seeing him again when he ventures out into the courtyard to hang with Max. Warren hasn’t seen him hunch his shoulders that high since a time before this loop even existed, a clear indicator (one of many, Warren now knows) that something wasn’t right with Nathan that day.

Nathan’s with his usual cronies near the fountain, sitting on the edge with his leg up in a way he probably thought made him look edgy and cool (and, okay, it kind of did) and Hayden calls Warren’s name and gives him a wave when Warren passes by their general line of sight. Warren hesitantly waves back, taken a little off-guard by the sudden friendly gesture from someone who previously probably didn’t even know Warren’s name, and Hayden grins at him. Warren doesn’t approach them, but Nathan makes sure to catch Warren’s eye and Warren gives him a shake of the head in what he hopes is reassurance nothing has manifested from his strange encounter with the phantom whales. At least, not in the short amount of time they’d been apart.

He’s not sure his message gets across, but Nathan could always text him if he really needed to. Warren wasn’t going to throw himself into the shark pool just to get some clarification established. For now, Warren just wants to see Max and forget about the day before, because, if the whales _did_ mean anything, he didn’t expect the meaning to reveal itself right then and there. That would be an anomaly to everything else that had happened, and Warren wasn’t counting on anomalies. He only hoped that wouldn’t be his undoing.

Though he’d tried his best to push the whales from his mind, it occurs to him as he’s sitting across from Max on a picnic table a little ways from the Academy, with a pizza between them, that Max’s journey with time had included unusual pieces that his had not—namely in the form of a phantom deer she had mentioned seeing a few loops back. He’d never thought before that maybe the deer wasn’t so much a ghost as it was a vision, like the whales had been for him, but now he wondered if it had been exactly that. He’s not sure Max would expect Warren to know about it, since he can’t remember if this version of her had told him (it was difficult keeping all the discrepancies apart, okay, even for someone like him), but he knows she’s spoken to the janitor at the academy about something or another, and maybe the two were connected in some way. Or, maybe, she’d just have some better insight on what the whales could mean.

As long as he kept the details to himself, Warren figures, asking couldn’t hurt, right?

 _Famous last words_ , something whispers in the back of his mind, and he has to blatantly ignore it as he goes to open his mouth.

“What do you know about whales?” Warren breaks in, leaning his arms on the table between them.

“Whales?” Max repeats through the mouthful of pizza she had just bitten off. She chews it thoughtfully, then swallows. “They’re sea-dwelling mammals and they’re really big?” she tries.

“Well, duh,” Warren replies. “But what about, like, spiritually? What do they represent and stuff, that mystical shit.”

Max cocks an eyebrow at him. “What?” she laughs hesitantly. “What would I know about that kind of mumbo-jumbo?” There’s enough confusion in her statement that, for a brief moment, Warren thinks it must not have been this loop that she confided in him about the ghost deer she’d seen guiding her places during her journey. He pushes that away, though, because the ghost deer wasn’t important, and maybe she might not have even seen it this time. It didn’t matter. She had definitely spoken to what’s-his-name, though. He knew that much.

Warren shrugs. “You talk to that creepy janitor all the time, and everyone knows he’s got some weird boner for the Native American foundations of the land the school’s on. He talks about the squirrels and whatnot all the time. Thought maybe whales had come up,” he says in an attempt at nonchalance, then tries not to wince at himself, because _ouch_. Not the smoothest transition he’d ever executed, but Max doesn’t seem to notice. Warren decides not to let that wound his ego.

Well, not _too_ much.

“Hey, Samuel’s actually a pretty nice guy,” Max protests, setting her half-eaten slice of pizza down. “Okay, yeah, he’s a little weird,” she amends when Warren just looks at her, “but he’s really interesting to talk to, and he has a lot of things to say that you probably haven’t thought about, Mr. I’m-a-man-of-science. Have you ever actually held a conversation with him before?”

“No,” Warren admits. “I’ve never had a reason to.”

“Well, now you do. You should ask him about the whales if you’re so keen to know.” Max frowns slightly, cocking her head. “Why _do_ you want to know about whales?”

Warren hesitates. He had no proof his vision of the whales was anything more than his brain messing with him, and Nathan was already panicking enough over the incident for three people, so maybe Max’s involvement wasn’t needed just yet. Warren promised himself he’d involve her at some point if it was more than Warren was hoping it would be, because she’d kill him if he left her out. She still reminded him sometimes that he hadn’t told her anything in his past loops—something Warren regretted admitting in the first place, because she never would have known if he hadn’t _told_ her.

“Symbolism might have played a larger part in everything that happened than I thought it did when it was happening,” Warren tells her instead, “and whales are important to the town, right? So, now that it’s all said and done, I want to know everything I didn’t before.”

Max gives him a mildly pitying look. Warren finds with surprise that it annoys him slightly—he didn’t want to be pitied, even by Max.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to let this all go?” Max reaches a hand out and puts it on Warren’s arm. “Dwelling on it might only make it worse for you, Warren, and everything’s already had too much time to crack a hammer on your skull.”

Warren could hear what she didn’t say: the incident had changed him. He’d known that fact long ago, that he’d never be the same Warren he was before this had all happened to him. That he was still Warren, but this Warren had demons the other never could have imagined existed. Not to him. Not _for_ him. Warren had, for better or worse, changed. Grown.

For Warren himself, the change had been gradual, over a period of months that nearly completed half of a year. It wasn’t unnatural for someone as young as him to change in that span of time, he knew that much, but most people his age didn’t relive the same horrific month enough times for it to drastically change who they were. The change had been gradual, yes, but it was stark, the difference of who he’d become to whom he’d been.

For Max, though, the change had happened in a matter of days. Possibly even overnight, because he couldn’t quite remember how he’d acted that final first day he’d woken up beyond the breakdown he’d had in Nathan’s room. It must have been a shock to her, whatever it is she had witnessed in a timespan so much shorter than Warren’s own, and it spoke volumes to Warren that she hadn’t immediately called him out on it when it had happened.

Warren presses his lips together, pushing a breath out through his nose. “I can’t let it go,” he tells Max quietly. “That’s just who I am. When I need to know something, I have to know it. Now that there’s time to, I can’t let it go.”

A small smile quirks Max’s lips. “You’re such a nerd. This is why you’re so good at your sciences.”

Warren returns the smile for a beat, but then falls back to frowning again. “This isn’t science, though. Not the science I’m used to. Core science? Real, solid chemistry and physics and weather phenomena with formulas and sense to back them up? I can do that. I can do that any day of the week. This?” Warren waves a hand through the air, resisting the urge to scrub it through his hair out of habit, because his fingers were still slick with pizza grease. “This crap? The crap that fueled my little journey through shitty timey-wimey bullcrap? I don’t know how to do this beyond fumbled theory, and not even to the point where I could actually comprehensively explain exactly what happened to me. This is Stephen Hawkin-level weird science. This is string theory and alternate dimensions and ‘a butterfly flaps its wings and fuck we’re all dead’ level stuff that has formulas without examples behind it to render it solidly true, because, yes, it probably does exist, but how can I _prove_ it? Hell, I can’t even prove _it happened_ _to me_.”

And that was possibly the part that killed him the most. The farther he got into the timeline he was now firmly stuck in, the more he questioned if any of it had actually happened. He had no proof, nothing but his own word and the occasional fact he shouldn’t have known. No one would believe him if he tried to explain to someone who could help him, either. Not even if Max helped him with her side of the story. In fact, her time powers and assertion that they existed was a lot of what kept Warren from flat out starting to wonder if it might have all been in his head. It was all just too … _unreal_. Without Max, Warren doesn’t know what he’d think.

“I’m smart,” Warren asserts immediately, because he certainly was, “but I’m not Stephen Hawkin. I can’t just snap my fingers and decide it’s a done deal because it happened and there’s a little theory to it, and because people trust my word in the realm of science so it’s accepted by many. Max, I _need_ to _know_.”

Max stares at him, seemingly shocked into silence at Warren’s ramble. Or, Warren thinks rationally, something he said, because he rambles all the time and it never affects her like this. Warren waves his hand in front of her face. “Max? Hello? You’re not in some food coma, are you? Because that’s not actually a thing, it’s really just—”

“A butterfly,” Max cuts in. Her tone is confused, even mystified. Warren drops his hand.

“Yeah? It’s just a saying to explain—”

“No, Warren. A butterfly, I saw— I have a picture—well, Chloe does,” Max scrambles through her words, wiping her hand on her jeans and then turning to dig around in her bag. Warren watches her, unsure of what she was trying to explain. She’d never mentioned a butterfly before. After a moment, she pulls out her phone and says, “I have a picture of it, but I gave it to Chloe.”

Warren’s brain clicks. “You think it was a sign?” he tries, because maybe it hadn’t been a deer this time. Or maybe there had just been more signs, ones even Warren hadn’t known about.

“I don’t know what it was,” Max admits once she’s finished tapping away at the screen. Almost immediately, her phone buzzes, and she taps the screen before flipping the phone around to face Warren. On the screen is a picture of a polaroid, and the polaroid is of a bright blue butterfly. Warren’s stomach drops. It must be clear on his face because Max leans forward eagerly. “Bizzaro, right? I found it in the bathroom the same day I saw the storm in Jefferson’s classroom. I thought it was just escaped from the science lab or trapped in from outside or something, but now that you mention butterflies, do you think it was something more?”

Warren stares at the picture, his heart firmly nestled in his gut. “That’s a Blue Morpho,” he says quietly, gravely, then, like he’d forgotten to breathe, he gasps. Max frowns at him inquisitively. “Blue Morphos don’t— They’re not native to North America. Especially not Oregon. _Especially_ not in the middle of October.” Warren sits back and covers his mouth with his hand for a second. “Have you seen one since?”

“Since my time powers stopped? No.”

Tension Warren doesn’t realize had built up in his chest eases at Max’s words. It wasn’t concrete, but maybe the whales had been nothing but a reminder of things he’d forgotten. Something subconsciously repressed in his mind resurfacing to make sure he didn’t forget what he’d been put through.

 _But I’d never seen the whales_ , Warren thinks, and a trickle of cold cuts through his relief. _How did I see them then? How did I know what they looked like?_

Movies, he tries to tell himself. He doesn’t try to think of where he might have seen beached whales before, because he’s afraid he actually hasn’t.

What else could it possibly be?

“Mind if Chloe stops by?” Max asks suddenly, pulling Warren back to the present.

“Oh, shit, actually,” he starts, abruptly reminded of what he’d resolved to do. He reaches out and pinches his fingers around Max’s jacket sleeve. Max doesn’t pull away, but her smile turns confused. “I want to tell Chloe about the time loops,” Warren explains quietly, like anyone would be able to hear them. Which is ridiculous, because no one else is there.

Max’s expression turns first to surprise, then to doubt, and then—surprisingly—to worry. “Are you sure about that, Warren?”

Warren hesitates. “Should I not be?”

“It’s your story. I trust Chloe with my life, but …” Max pauses. “You know Chloe. She’ll be upset she didn’t know when everyone else did, and she might not understand, but once she gets over herself, she’ll guard that secret with everything she’s got.”

Warren’s memory flashes back to the night they’d ambushed Jefferson, to the short conversation he’d had with Chloe in the car, and he shakes his head slowly. “I think she’ll understand,” he tells Max. Max’s eyes narrow momentarily, but then she shrugs and taps something out on her phone.

“We’d better finish this pizza before she gets here,” she announces, picking up her pizza slice again. “She’ll be here soon, and she’ll demolish whatever we leave out in the open.”

Warren snorts and takes a slice, but his mind is elsewhere, and, despite the fact he assured Max Chloe would understand, nerves still eat at him. Mixed with the apprehension from yesterday, it just makes him feel sick.

Thankfully, Max seems preoccupied with the idea of Chloe coming by, and she doesn’t notice a thing.

 

* * *

 

If Warren had aimed for elegance in his execution when it came to telling Chloe his story, he misses his mark by a mile.

“I got stuck in a time loop,” Warren blurts abruptly, the first words he’d said since Chloe had arrived. Chloe, laughing over a slice of pizza, cuts herself off and gives Warren one of those “Are you going insane?” looks he’s gotten so used to getting. She’d only arrived a few minutes ago, and, after greeting both Max and Warren, immediately helped herself to the remains of the pizza on the picnic table. A conversation hadn’t even really started but, now, there’d be no chance for it to, and Warren wouldn’t have to worry about never managing to slip his confession in. He tells himself that’s pretty much what he’d been aiming for, if only so he can’t dwell on the way he couldn’t even start a conversation before diving into the deep end.

Max freezes where she sits when Warren’s words hit the air, her face completely draining of color in one go. Her eyes flick to Chloe, then back to Warren. She doesn’t say anything.

“What?” Chloe says, looking between him and Max. “Time loop? The fuck you talkin’ ‘bout, Graham?”

Warren licks his lips, readying himself to explain. “Remember how Max could control time in short bursts,” he starts, and Chloe nods to show she’s following, her lips curled to one side in a phantom smirk, “Well,” he continues, “she wasn’t the only one with weird time shit interfering with her life.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Chloe exclaims, sounding half-amused and half-annoyed, like she thinks he’s trying to pull the wool over her eyes in some sort of trick or prank. She reaches across the table and socks Warren in the arm. Warren winces, but when neither he nor Max laugh or ease up on their serious manner, Chloe stiffens, the humor visibly draining from her face to be replaced with something harder. “What? You were able to control time, too? What the hell, Warren? Why didn’t you take Max’s place when she and Prescott—”

“Chloe, not like that,” Max tells her, her hand on Chloe’s upper arm to stop her from continuing. Chloe frowns down at Max, then gives Warren a bewildered look.

Warren takes a deep breath. “I was stuck in a time loop.”

Silence falls between them for a bare moment, then Chloe’s eyes harden and bore into Warren as if they could scalp him alive. “Explain,” she demands, and there’s no room to argue.

Warren explains. When he first starts, he stumbles over himself, cutting off and backtracking, because the beginning was the hardest for him to put into words, even though it all had started with him simply thinking it had been an elaborate nightmare.

More than once Chloe turns her confused gaze onto Max as if asking her if she believed what was coming out of Warren’s mouth, but Max only nods at her each time she does, and, eventually, Warren gets some semblance of the start of everything out into the air. Then, he starts on everything else, and he knows he can’t keep the strain out of his voice as he ventures deeper into his tale.

Despite knowing he was free from it all, talking about it, especially at length, still wasn’t easy for Warren to do. The same went for researching what possibly could have happened to him—as much as he wanted to do it and tried to, the fact it was all done and over with made the ordeal no easier to look into than it had been when he’d been in the midst of it all happening around him.

Though Chloe’s aggression from her misunderstanding remains on her face when Warren first starts, it steadily melts away into confusion, and then to disbelief. She doesn’t interrupt Warren as he struggles through his story, and from beside her Max’s attention switches from split between Chloe and Warren to solely on Warren as he touches on things he’d only told Nathan before. Their attention on him is rapt, and when Warren cuts himself off suddenly to grind his teeth together in the frustration he still felt over specific parts of the loops, they wait patiently for him to relax enough to continue.

“A time loop,” he finally repeats once he’s reached what he felt was enough of an end, because the rest of the story they already knew. “It was all a fucking time loop. It took me four—no, five tries, but I must have gotten it all right this time, because all of it stopped.”

Chloe looks at Warren silently, her mouth turned in a frown and her forehead wrinkled in an expression Warren can’t quite decipher. Max watches her, her eyes straying to Warren once, twice, as they wait for Chloe to speak, and then she does.

“Shit,” is all she says, but the single word is full of disbelief and acceptance, and Warren knows she understands why he’d kept it all from her until now.

Her hand snakes out and grasps his for a brief second, her eyes on his, and they share a wordless moment with Max watching on. Warren pulls back with a short nod, then pushes himself from the picnic table and clutches the front of his shirt, unsure of how to explain he wanted to go. Thankfully, he doesn’t need to say anything, because Max stands up and walks around the table to pat him on the back.

“I’ll call you later, okay?” she tells him softly.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and his thanks are in his tone. Max touches her fingers to his shoulder once and then he’s free, and Warren turns and walks away.

He walks the path back to Blackwell silently, his thoughts racing around in his head, ghost whales completely forgotten in the wake of remembering his journey, and he stays within himself up until he makes it to the front of the dorms, where he nearly walks face-first into Trevor just as he’s leaving.

“Ack!” Trevor grunts, turning on his heel to avoid Warren. He just barely makes it—but he trips down the first step for his trouble. “Hey, Graham-man,” Trevor says immediately, as if he didn’t just pretty much nearly get steam-rolled by Warren not paying attention to where he was walking. Warren gives him a nod, but this isn’t enough for Trevor. “What’s up? You look like someone died.”

Warren, despite himself, winces, and Trevor’s half-joking expression falls immediately to alarm. “Shit, dude, I’m sorry,” he backtracks, holding his hands out and looking like he personally killed whomever he thought had died. “I was kidding, I didn’t mean any disrespect. Are you okay?”

“What? No, Trevor.” Warren waves his hands like it could dispel what was currently happening. “No. No one died, stop. I’m fine, I didn’t mean to run you off like that, I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

Trevor’s shoulders visibly relax. “Oh, shit. No worries there. You sure you’re all right though?”

Warren tries to keep his expression neutral, because he really just wants to get back into his room and chill. “Yeah, thinking too hard about weird science stuff.”

Trevor laughs. “You _are_ the smart kid in this school. Hey, I’m heading out, but if you need me, hit me up, yeah?”

Trevor seems to think Warren will do just that, because he doesn’t wait for Warren to respond before he’s gone, and Warren is left at the front doors of the dorms with a rejection held on his tongue. Not because he doesn’t want to talk to Trevor, but because he doesn’t have Trevor’s number.

Did Trevor have Warren’s number? How would he have gotten his hands on that?

Warren shakes his head in confusion, then absconds to his room for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tfw u almost post the third chapter of the wrong fic and very nearly don't even notice
> 
> Also -- happy 18th to my anon friend! Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good birthday! ♡


	4. Dead Girl Walking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for a panic attack in this one. All video game warnings should still apply to the whole story, but I can't remember any attacks of the sort in the game, so I'm throwing this out just in case.

“The fuck are you supposed to be?” Nathan asks Warren, frowning and eyeing up Warren like he was an unwanted piece of meat placed before him.

“I’m The Doctor.” Warren holds his arms out and looks down at himself. Was it not obvious? “Wait, let me get my screwdriver out.”

Nathan only squints at him as he digs around in his pockets and procures his sonic screwdriver replica, which lights up when he pushes the button on the side. Nathan looks between the screwdriver and Warren himself uncomprehendingly. “Doctor of what?” he finally says.

Warren wilts. “No, you’re supposed to ask, ‘Doctor who?’”

“Oh,” Nathan says, nodding his head with realization, “you’re from that one show with the hot redhead.”

“Is that really all you remember about a show I’ve played _at least_ three times with you in the same room?”

“Yup,” Nathan says, popping the end of the word with a look of boredom as his gaze wanders, surveying the room they’re standing in. It’s mostly bare; the boxes and coolers at his and Warren’s feet are filled with what will be decorating and supplying the party that night. His gaze centers on the doorway and Warren follows it, but no one is there. It’s only the two of them, which made Warren wonder not for the first time why he was even dragged out of his dorm room so early.

Warren huffs, causing Nathan’s eyes to flick back to him. “And what are you supposed to be?” he challenges, gesturing to Nathan’s outfit with his screwdriver. “A greaser? A brown-haired Danny Zuko? Something along those lines?”

Nathan looks down at his leather-jacket-clad arm and shrugs. “Fucked if I know. I don’t do this shit anymore, this is all Vic’s idea. She figures the fancy crap out and I handle the other aspects of the party.”

“Is this you handling it?” Warren teases, shoving his screwdriver back into his pocket and bending down to open up one of the coolers.

Nathan stops him by putting his foot on the lid of the cooler before Warren manages to get it open. “Yes,” he says shortly, looking down his chest at Warren when he gives Nathan an annoyed look over being thwarted. “We’ve got two hours to get everything stocked and in the right place. Victoria will be here to start decorating soon, and once she’s going she’s not going to let anyone stop. She’s like a rabid Rottweiler with streamers and dry ice when she’s in her zone.”

Warren wrinkles his nose and stands back up. Nathan’s moved onto a cardboard box and is in the middle of prying the flap open by the time he’s managed to do so without stepping on something he shouldn’t, as he was prone to doing lately. “Two hours? You’ll need me, like, an hour tops. I’m quick once I know what I’m doing, and the party doesn’t even start until eight.”

“So you’ll be here for it early, big fucking deal. Stop twisting my nads.”

Warren rolls his eyes. “I don’t need to be here for it early, I’m not going to the party.”

That stops Nathan in his tracks. He turns to Warren sharply, and for a flash of a second Warren can swear he sees a look of disappointment on Nathan’s face. But the expression is clearly one of annoyance once Warren gets a good look at it, and he decides he must have willfully imagined any disappointment.

“You’re not staying for the party?” Nathan asks. Despite his expression, there’s no aggression in his tone, just inquiry.

“No, going out with Max, Chloe, and Kate.”

“Kate?” Nathan scoffs. “I didn’t realize Jesus was big on begging for candy from strangers.”

“We’re not trick-or-treating,” Warren corrects, walking to Nathan’s side and bending to open the box Nathan had abandoned. Nathan doesn’t move to help, he only watches Warren wrench it open on his own. “We’re going to that haunted walk thing they’re holding in town.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nathan says quietly. “Forgot they did that.”

Warren looks up at Nathan with a frown, curious of the unusually quiet tone, but Nathan only cocks an eyebrow at him as if asking him to challenge it, so Warren decides to let it go. He wanted to have a nice Halloween, and an argument with Nathan over anything wasn’t the way to start that.

“If you really want me to,” Warren continues, pulling rolls of streamers and lights out of the box rapidly as a flash of black leather appears in the doorway, followed by the form of Victoria in attractively-tight leather pants, “I’ll stop by when we’re done and see how everything’s going.”

Warren doesn’t miss the snort Nathan gives him in return even under the commands Victoria starts barking at them to get everything out. “Do what the hell you want, Graham. No one gives a shit where you go.”

Warren scoffs and wants to call Nathan out on his pretty-blatant lie, but he never gets a chance to, because Victoria shuffles him off to one corner with a line of paper skulls and Nathan to another with a cooler of alcohol, and, in the whirlwind of everything, Warren doesn’t catch sight of Nathan again before he’s released from duty and pushed out the door.

 

* * *

 

“Chloe!” Max screeches, shoving Chloe’s arm out of her face. A thick, white web of silly string falls from her flowy sleeve to the ground, and Chloe cackles with laughter at the reaction she got from Max. Max—dressed as a pirate along with Chloe in an inside joke Warren doesn’t quite understand—whips her pirate hat off to whack Chloe with it, and Chloe turns to sprint out of the way, shoving past a man in a zombie outfit as she goes, with Max hot on her heels. Warren watches them leave him, and they’re quickly lost to the crowd.

“They look like they’re having fun.” Warren turns his head to find Kate, dressed in a long traditional Mexican dress, looking into the crowd with a smile. “Am I late?” she asks, turning the smile on Warren. He returns it.

“Nah, we just got here. Chloe somehow already got her hands on a can of that glow-in-the-dark string stuff they make the webs out of. Max hates it.” As if to punctuate his statement, a very clear screech of “CHLOE!” follows his words, and both he and Kate glance at one another and share a laugh. “Love the skin paint,” Warren tells her once he’s regained control of his vocal cords, circling a finger around his own face to indicate, as if it weren’t obvious. “Dia de los Muertos?”

“La Catrina,” Kate confirms, pulling a fan from the pocket of her traditional dress and opening it with a snap of her wrist. She hides her face behind it, then gives him a wink. “I thought it would be nice to honor an important Mexican figure. I couldn’t get the hat she’s usually depicted wearing, but I tried to at least get the makeup and flowers down.”

Warren takes a moment to look at her. She does indeed have large fake flowers woven in a crown around her blonde head, and her hair is free from its usual bun in a half-up, half-down hairstyle Warren couldn’t name if he tried. It’s a shockingly good look on her, and the elaborate white, black, and red face paint that she wears only accentuates the fact she’s more attractive than Warren had ever bothered to notice.

“It looks great,” Warren tells her, trying to ignore the way his tongue is suddenly sticking to the roof of his mouth. “Did you know Catrina can even be traced back to the Aztecs? They had their own version of her, and she also shows up in other cultures around the world.”

Kate tilts her head in consideration, still smiling at him. The smile pulls something in Warren, and he suddenly realizes that this is the first time he’s really _ever_ seen Kate smile. That this is the first time he’s ever really seen her so _happy_. “I didn’t know that. That’s pretty cool, Warren,” she tells him, and he blinks back to the present, pushing the past away again. “You’re the Eleventh Doctor, right?”

Warren looks at her in surprise. “You watch Doctor Who?”

“A little. I haven’t seen all of it, but I know one doctor from another.”

Warren’s heart does the fluttery little dance it always does when he realizes he’s being given the opportunity to rant about something he loves, but he’s thwarted from his attempt at discussing the show with her by the reemergence of Max and Chloe. Chloe slaps Warren on the back, cackling, and Warren stumbles over his feet from the force of it. Max looks less than pleased at the strings of goop hanging from her costume, but there’s a small smile playing on her lips, so Warren knows she’s not _really_ upset.

“Everyone ready for some bogus Halloween shenans?” Chloe questions them cheerfully, grinning wide enough to show a majority of her teeth. Kate claps her hands excitedly.

“Yes! What do you have planned, Captain?”

“Captain,” Chloe repeats, impressed, then elbows Warren with one arm and Max with the other. “I like her gibe. Captain! Nice ring to it.”

“Chloe,” Max groans, rolling her eyes.

“Okay, okay! Let’s round the gardens and nab some of the free refreshments, and then hit up the haunted house.”

Max tilts her head. “They have a haunted house here?”

“Hell yeah, they do!” Chloe sings.

“It’s usually the most popular event, they go all out,” Kate adds on. “Usually the makeup is so good it looks real.”

“It’s all that Prescott money,” Chloe mock-whispers from behind the back of her hand.

“At least it’s being used for something cool.”

“God forbid it be used to shape the town up!” Chloe presses a hand to her heart mockingly, her eyes turning in their sockets. Kate giggles from behind her hand, once again glowing with excitement and happiness Warren has never once seen her exhibit, and then Chloe is hooking an arm around both her and Max’s waists and directing them into the crowd, leaving Warren to trail along behind them.

 

* * *

 

The house is dark, creepy, and vaguely dangerous-looking, but Warren figures that’s the point of the whole aesthetic thing that came with the holiday. This is the first year he hasn’t spent the entirety of the Halloween night deep in a Halloween-special D&D campaign, usually penned and DM’d by himself, and one look at the house teeming with people both his age and older in costumes that look a little _too_ professionally put-together to be simple drugstore purchases makes him think that maybe this was the wrong year to go and break that tradition.

He hasn’t spoken to most of his D&D friends since getting accepted into Blackwell, and he blames that mostly on himself, though the general distance that getting accepted into a senior-only school at the age of sixteen creates was also at fault for the lack of communication between them. Warren had anticipated the time it would consume to attend Blackwell, but he hadn’t anticipated the distance it would put between him and his former friends, despite how close they’d been when he’d been attending regular school. That had been a blow that he’d tried not to think about during the time he’d been at the academy (and at home, because they didn’t visit—they always were too busy, and he knows that there’s more to the excuse than just the word itself, but he doesn’t question it, because he’s been too busy for them and it wasn’t fair to do so when they didn’t to him), and then managed to completely forget in the wake of the loops when they were everything he had known when they’d happened. He occasionally thought about it now, but it wasn’t anything close to how much he’d thought about it before, when he’d been so lonely and wanting for a friend to fill the void.

Warren might have had a massive crush on Max back when he’d first started school with her, but there had been more to his want to hang out with her than just the crush. He’d been lonesome, and she’d been relatively accepting of him in a way that was different from the almost-encroaching attention Brooke gave him, and it gave Max a pull Warren couldn’t ignore.

Also, she was—is—really cute. That hadn’t hurt anything.

But he’d been lonely, and his friends had fallen to the wayside where they could no longer be reached, and that had fueled the majority of his attraction to Max as a whole. Now, he had friends in the form of Max, Chloe, Brooke (whom had surprisingly let up recently, though he didn’t know why, because it’s not as if he had ignored her each time she came to him with want for discussion—though she had the occasion to still be chilly once in a while), Kate, and, of course, Nathan, and he wouldn’t trade them for his old crew in any moment. Not even this one, even though they house they were about to enter looked a lot less like something he wanted to experience when he could be weaving a good, epic game of Halloween Dungeons and Dragons.

Not that he was about to wimp out on Max, Chloe, and Kate, who were gathered around him and chattering excitedly about the house as they grew closer to it in the slow line. He could do this, it was only a house of lights, props, and actors. Not all that different from the movies he loved watching, actually.

The ghoul at the front takes their pre-paid tickets, and into the dry-ice-filled doorway they go.

 

* * *

 

 _This isn’t so bad_ , Warren thinks to himself when another bloody bride screams at him for leaving her at the altar. She writhes against a wall, her bouquet clasped firmly a hand that’s missing a few fingers, and Warren’s so busy watching her that he nearly runs into the guy in overalls that revs a blade-less chainsaw into the air above his head. Kate yelps from his side, latching onto his arm, and Warren momentarily wonders where the hell Chloe and Max have gotten diverted to when he and Kate are scare-ushered into the next room of the house by bloody-chainsaw-man.

“Oh no,” Warren hears Kate whisper, her grip tightening, as the room fills with a wave of dry ice and a myriad of neon lights filter through a sudden strobe that starts up. The light of the room is just bright enough that Warren can navigate around, but the smoke, flashing, and colors distort the way and cause him to need to stop every few steps in order to right himself again.

The howling and cackling that the actors are doing directly in his ears doesn’t help anything, either.

“Where’s the exit?” Kate calls to Warren, still holding onto him tightly.

“No fucking clue,” he answers, craning his neck to look around and becoming temporarily distorted when the strobe starts up faster. “Shit. Can’t a guy have a little seeing room?”

An actor screeches a laugh in response to his request, and Warren only sighs in annoyance. This _was_ the point of the house, but they could make it a little easier to traverse, dammit.

“Oh!” Kate says suddenly. “I think I see the way out!”

“What?” Warren asks, looking over her head to see where she’s facing, but he doesn’t see anything. “Where?”

“There!” Kate pulls on Warren’s arm, guiding him, but a sudden dizziness hits just as he starts taking a step in the direction she’s trying to lead him. “Warren?” Kate asks in concern, just as blackness starts to ring his vision.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Warren hisses. The strobe pulses against his eyes, keeping him from regaining coherence. “I’m fine, I just need a second,” he tells Kate when he feels her grip suddenly go slack, but when he glances down at her to give her some form of reassuring expression, he nearly chokes on his own sudden scream.

Lights flash against her empty sockets and cracks spider-web around the pale, washed-out structure of the skull that grins back at him, and Warren’s pulse deafens in his ears. Because it’s not Kate looking back at him anymore, it’s her skeleton. It’s her after she’d fallen, after she’d lost all hope, before anyone had figured out that in the end she could be saved from herself and from the darkness that engulfed her. Before anyone had tried enough to get her ending right.

Warren stares through the rapid flashing that illuminates the shattered bones over and over again, his scream caught in his throat with his breath, all mental processing ceased completely. He can’t blink. He can’t breathe. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he knows he’d saved Kate this time. This wasn’t her he was looking at—that version of her was no more. This is not Kate.

Not Kate.

Not.

_NOT._

Kate’s broken skull shakes from side to side, as if it’s telling him something he can’t understand, and then, with another flash, it’s Kate again. His Kate; alive Kate, looking at him with such concern that Warren nearly falls to his knees in a combination of relief and breathlessness. He gulps down a breath he couldn’t take before and tries his best to tell her it was the dry ice fucking him up. His voice cracks, tongue fumbling, and Kate’s eyes widen from beneath the white and black and red paint that surrounds them. The lie must get across to her because the next thing Warren knows, she’s tugging on his arm again and pulling him into the next room. Luckily for him, it’s the one adjoined to the exit, and she pulls him out just as one of the actors stops howling long enough to ask if everything’s all right.

“Warren?” she calls to him while he blinks rapidly, eyes on his feet and brain a fuzzy howl of static. What the _hell_ was _that_? It couldn’t have been a premonition, it couldn’t have been. Kate—right here, holding his arm and trying her best to check on his current well-being without forcing him Kate—was not who she had been when she’d been ready to throw herself to her death. Right? The Kate back then rarely smiled, rarely seemed excited about anything. This Kate had found something in her life, friends or help, or maybe both. She was better. Right?

_Right?_

Warren’s eyes stray to Kate’s worried face. Her eyebrows shoot up with relief, face leaning closer, and Warren shakes himself.

“Sorry,” he coughs out. “Too much dry ice.”

“You looked like you were having a panic attack,” Kate says. Her hands haven’t released Warren’s arm yet, and he doesn’t try to shake her off. He doesn’t really want to. “Has that happened before?”

“No.”

_Yes._

“That was new.”

_That happened to me when I saw the whales on the beach._

“I don’t know why it happened, but I’m okay.”

_You caused it. You caused it, Kate. You caused it when you killed yourself over and over and I had no idea I could save you._

Warren was not okay.

“Maybe we should get you back to your room,” Kate urges gently, giving his arm a small squeeze.

“Get who back to their room?” Max asks, emerging from the house with Chloe by her side. Chloe’s shaking slightly, but she has the remains of a grin on her face that. “What’s going on?”

“Warren had some sort of attack,” Kate tells them before Warren can signal to her not to say anything. Both Max’s and Chloe’s expressions sober immediately, and then all eyes are on Warren. Warren blanches.

“No, no. Dry ice, lights, I got dizzy and shit. Probably getting sick.”

Chloe’s face screams “bullshit detected”, but thankfully she doesn’t call him out on it. Warren knows there’s no way she could know about the vision of the whales, but he wonders if she’s made her own conclusions about things since he’d told her about his loops. He doubts it, but Chloe’s always been the more suspicious of the three of them—Nathan not included.

“We’ll walk you back,” Max offers, though it sounds like an order, and Warren holds up his hands, taking his phone out of his pocket along with the gesture, and procures his best guilty face.

“No, come on, I can get to my room on my own easily. I want you guys to stay here and do more shit, it’s only …” Warren pauses with his phone in his hand, Nathan’s number on the screen and the timer beneath it telling him he’d been calling Nathan for the past forty-six seconds. “Shit,” Warren hisses, ending the call and hoping voicemail hadn’t picked anything up. “I’ll head back, it’s just a headache. You guys stay, I don’t want to be reason Halloween is a bust.”

Max worries her lip, but none of them make any move to protest. “All right,” Chloe finally amends, though she sounds like she doesn’t want to. “If that’s what you want, but you have to keep in contact with us for the rest of the night so we know you didn’t die.”

Warren huffs and rolls his eyes. “I’m not going to die, I’m just going to go back to my room and rest.”

Chloe snorts, her smile reemerging, and Warren agrees to keep them updated for as long as he’s awake. They accept this, and Warren leaves them to the rest of their Halloween activities in favor of retreating to his room.

 

* * *

 

Warren looks at his feet the entire trek back, even down the hallway to his room, thinking about the—vision? —the entire way, and he doesn’t notice he has a visitor until he very nearly runs into him.

“Oh, Nathan,” Warren says in mild surprise, blinking at the form of Nathan hunching over by the wall next to his door. Then, he frowns, the time of night registering as incompatible with Nathan’s presence. “Wait a second, what are you doing here? The party’s still going on.”

Nathan shrugs and scuffs the toe of his shoe on the carpet, hands shoved into the pockets of his leather jacket. There’s a bright red lipstick imprint on his cheek, and Warren’s eyes zero in on it the second he sees it. Where the hell did Nathan get _that_? “Making sure Price kept you in one piece. Heard you saying something about coming back here in your butt-dial.”

Oops. So Nathan had picked up when Warren had accidentally called him. Great.

“Aw Nathan,” Warren coos instead of apologizing, smirking and moving to unlock his door. “You _do_ care.”

Nathan scoffs, not offering a response, and follows Warren into his room. He secures a spot on the bed before Warren’s really noticed, and Warren decides to start shedding some of his costume, the bulk of it feeling heavy in the warmer air of the dormitories.

“You planning on staying?” Warren asks Nathan when Nathan seems settled and comfortable where he’s chosen to sit.

Nathan’s face twitches, like the question annoys him. It probably does, actually, but that’s never stopped Warren from asking things he knew were unnecessary anyway. “Guess so. You’re not coming to the party, and I don’t feel like shitting around VIP area with Vic and Hayden busy schooling Trevor’s ass on the down low of how we roll.”

Warren cocks an eyebrow. “Shitting around?”

“Shut the hell up,” Nathan tells him, then throws a pillow at Warren when he starts snickering.

“Don’t give Trevor a hard time,” Warren says once he’s been pelted. “He’s been relatively nice to me lately, and I don’t want to see him getting frozen to death by that glare Victoria has.”

“Tell her that, I’m not her keeper.”

Warren wrinkles his nose. “And risk becoming a highly-attractive ice statue myself? Hell no. Trevor can handle himself, never mind.”

“That’s what I thought, pussy,” Nathan declares triumphantly, then leans back against the wall with his arms crossed behind his head, legs tapping a muffled rhythm against the carpet. “What are you doing back, was the hay ride too scary for wittle Warren’s heawt?”

Warren glares at Nathan, but doesn’t offer him an answer, and, somehow, Nathan manages to realize that means something _had_ happened, and Warren was back in his dorm because of it. He sits right back up again and clutches his bouncing knees, giving Warren a piercing look that he had no doubt matched Victoria’s well when used in unison. “Well?” he urges in a tone that offered no outlet. “Spill it, Graham.”

Warren presses his lips together, debating on actually telling Nathan of the episode (he didn’t _really_ want to call them visions—they weren’t real; Kate was alive, and she was going to stay that way this time) instead of some bullshit excuse, but, before he can choose to stop himself, he blurts out, “I tripped out over the strobe lights tonight.”

Nathan only blinks at him. “What?”

“I freaked out in one of rooms in the haunted house we went to. There was dry ice and strobe lights and laser lights and … I guess it all, I don’t know, triggered something. I started to see shit that wasn’t there.”

A wrinkle appears between Nathan’s eyebrows and he squints. “Shit that wasn’t there? What kind of shit?”

“Like.” Warren hesitates, struggling to find the words he needed to explain in a way that Nathan would be able to understand, hands gesturing in the air to convey his loss. “Like, Kate was dressed as La Catrina tonight—”

“La who the fuck?”

“She’s—ugh, you know. The skeleton lady, death, she’s an icon of the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos. A lot of people dress as her for Halloween, too, but she’s a massive part of the Mexican tradition.”

Nathan pauses for a second, thinking, then snaps his fingers. “The skull makeup? With the crazy colors and lacy designs and shit?”

“Yeah—well, no, that’s probably a sugar skull design they’re trying to mimic, but same basic concept. Same holiday. Yes.”

Nathan nods, satisfied with the confirmation, then waves his hand impatiently for Warren to continue.

“Right, well, she was dressed as La Catrina, so, like, you know, skull makeup. You could tell it was her and everything, and it wasn’t like it looked exactly like a real skull or whatever, but, the lights. They, like.” Warren scrubs a hand over his mouth, annoyed with his struggle over his words. “They can distort vision, you know, that’s what they’re usually used for, but instead of seeing Kate’s makeup distorted on her face, or with her face or whatever, I saw … just, a skull. A real skull. With her hair and everything, but bones instead of skin and flesh beneath it.” Warren closes his eyes on the memory that rises up. “They were—busted. Broken.”

Nathan doesn’t say anything. Warren keeps his eyes closed through the silence, the image of Kate’s fractured skull pasted in the darkness of his eyelids, and he waits.

“She fell from the top of the dorms,” Nathan finally says quietly.

“Jumped,” Warren corrects, his tone clipped. She hadn’t fallen—that implied there had been some sort of accident. Kate had wanted to kill herself. Kate had jumped.

“Jumped,” Nathan parrots, softly, unexpectedly, and Warren opens his eyes again. Nathan’s looking at him from where he’s slouched over in Warren’s bed, elbows on his knees and hands loosely weaved together at the fingers, seemingly uncomfortable with what was happening between them, but somehow still obviously sympathetic. The unfamiliar sight snags something in Warren, his fingers twitching to clutch the fabric over where his heart stuttered, but Nathan speaks again before he gets a chance to dwell on it. “Did you ever see it? Her?”

Warren nods, his hand dropping to his side as the feeling evaporates in the wake of Kate’s memory. “Every time it happened, yeah. Except the one where she was saved, obviously. And this time.”

Nathan winces— _winces_ —and Warren suddenly, desperately wants to know what’s happening inside Nathan’s mind right in that moment. But—he can’t ask. Because if he did, Nathan would close right back up, and Warren wouldn’t get anything more. The only thing to do was to wait and let Nathan decide what came out.

“That’s fucked up,” Nathan says, head turned to the side, and, Warren realizes with a start, he sounds guilty. Pained and guilty.

“Nathan,” Warren starts, but stops when Nathan’s eyes flick back to Warren’s, and the expression on his face is one of a challenge. Warren tries to drop the want to reassure him, knowing it wasn’t what Nathan wanted, but it surges back and he counts his blessings before he allows himself to only say, “You saved her this time, and that’s the part that really matters. You weren’t the person who helped push her off that edge. You _aren’t_ that person.”

Nathan doesn’t respond, but his hard blue eyes bore into Warren, and Warren can almost hear the “but I was once, and I could have been” that he doesn’t say—that Warren won’t say. Because people change, and Nathan wasn’t. _Isn’t._

But neither of them say anything about it; Warren’s made his statement and Nathan doesn’t seem to want to say his part.

Instead, he grunts, shakes his head, and falls back against the bed, his leg starting up a bounce Warren hadn’t realized was missing from the picture for a few minutes there. Warren sighs, shedding the last of his costume so he was left in his undershirt and slacks, suspenders hanging from his waist, and then goes to fumble with his drawers.

“What are you looking for?” Nathan asks from behind him. For his sake, Warren ignores the slight roughness to his tone, because if he’d been facing him he probably wouldn’t have heard it at all in favor of what he was seeing.

“Movie collection.” Warren turns, the located flash drive in his grip. “Wanna join?”

“That question is going to get really fucking old one of these days,” Nathan hisses, which means yes. Warren sets up a playlist of old spooks on his laptop and then goes to the bed, nudging Nathan over until there was room, and settles in. They watch quietly as Dracula stalks across the screen, and then Warren hears Nathan mutter quietly, “It was just in your head, you know.”

Warren glances at him out of the corner of his eye, unwilling to miss the movie despite having seen it a number of times before. “I know. It just shook me up some.”

“It can’t hurt you,” Nathan continues, his tone strangely firm. The curve of his leather-clad shoulder presses into Warren’s cotton-covered one, and Warren can feel when it gives the involuntary twitch that always manifested somewhere. “It’s all in your head. The only thing it can do is make you hurt yourself.”

Warren frowns, then fully looks at Nathan. Nathan’s looking back at him, his face a mask of steel beneath the furrowed brow he perpetually wore. “You don’t think it’s a sign everything’s going to happen again?”

“No,” Nathan says, without question or hesitation. “I really think it’s just all in your head. I think it’s all that vicious bullcrap catching up with you now that you know you’re really done. Your mind doesn’t know how to let the nightmare go, even when it’s all finished.”

Warren feels his mouth twitch as he tries to reign in the crushed expression he knows his face wants to display, but he can’t stop his chin from trembling the single second it does. “You think I’m going insane?” Warren hears himself whisper, and winces minutely when his voice cracks over the last work.

Nathan waits a beat, then shrugs. “I think you might just be as crazy as I am.”

Despite the way the words might have sounded, Warren knew Nathan had meant it as a reassurance. A reassurance that, like Nathan, he could learn to control and live with what his mind was trying to conjure up against him. A reassurance that, like Nathan, he wouldn’t let his demons eat him alive and choose his path.

And that reassurance, Warren realizes as he turns back to the movie again, was what he had really wanted to hear. Because Nathan knew how to handle himself more often than not nowadays, and he had people surrounding him that did their best to help where they could. And if Warren was becoming just as psychotic as Nathan was, then it would be with people behind him, their hands at the ready to help him with his fall.

If Warren was really losing it, he had people who would do everything they could to save him from himself, because that’s what he had done for them. For Nathan.

It was most comforting reassurance than anyone could have ever possibly given him, and there’s no one in Warren’s life that could give him it except for the person who knew what he was talking about. And maybe, Warren thinks, that’s why he needed Nathan out of the whole thing alive and on his side. At the end of everything, he needed Nathan to save him like Warren had saved Nathan. Because without Nathan, where would Warren be right now?

“Graham?” Nathan’s confused tone wrapped around his name pulls Warren out of his thoughts, and Warren realizes with a start that he’s shaking. That his breathing is picking up. That his head is starting to swim and he feels like he’s on the verge of passing out. “Graham,” Nathan tries again, firmly this time, and Warren feels a hand wrap around his upper arm, “hey. Relax.”

Warren can hear him, and he knows vaguely what Nathan is trying to get him to do, but there’s a block between his brain and his ears, because the words aren’t processing right. Nothing is processing right; the only clear thought Warren can manage to have is that he needs to lie down before he falls off the bed. He thinks he conveys this thought audibly to Nathan, but he can’t actually hear himself doing so, and Nathan’s confused bark of alarm in the form of Warren’s name once again tells Warren he actually hadn’t said anything.

He can feel the blankets bunching up around his legs uncomfortably and Nathan’s clenching hands when they encompass his jaw, thumbs prying both his eyes open until he’s staring straight into Nathan’s blown pupils. _They always do that when he gets scared_ , Warren thinks idly between the blurred feeling of oncoming death. It takes a moment of staring before Nathan releases Warren’s eyelids and lets them slide back into place, and his grip slackens in time with the air that he releases from his lungs in a sigh.

“Thank fuck,” Warren hears him mumble. Whatever Nathan had been looking for, he hadn’t found it, and that had apparently been good. Warren still felt like he was dying a slow, scary death all the same. “Alright, Doctor Douchewaffle, you need to breathe. Come on Graham, focus on your breathing. It’s not going to go away until you slow down. Slow ones. Stop thinking about whatever bullshit you’re trying to Dolittle here, okay. Just breathe. Something about counting backwards. Psychology shit and magic fucking kittens, right? Assblasting bullshit of the century, but fuck it works. Don’t make me do an exercise with you, because I’ll charge you for that crap.”

He doesn’t use a soft tone when talking to Warren—doesn’t use kind words or gentle touches like Warren knows someone like Max would use in this situation, he just talks at Warren like he would in any other situation. He doesn’t change himself to be someone he thinks Warren needs, and Warren thinks, as his breathing slows and his heart stops pounding in his ears in response to the distraction Nathan offers him in his ranting, that’s because Nathan’s already who he needs him to be. Nathan, as he was, understood what was happening to Warren, and changing himself wasn’t on his agenda.

That, Warren thinks—no, Warren _knows_ —is why he needed Nathan around. Because Nathan wasn’t going to become someone he wasn’t. Nathan wasn’t going to become someone Warren couldn’t recognize.

“Who needs a psychiatrist now?” Nathan declares as he’s pulling Warren back up into a sitting position, having taken Warren starting the process himself as initiative to take the reins and get him up faster than Warren was trying to do himself. It makes Warren’s head spin, but he doesn’t think to reprimand Nathan for it.

“Dolittle was a veterinarian,” Warren says instead, clutching the front of his undershirt in a gesture that felt nothing short of natural anymore.

Nathan’s expression squints into one of annoyance. “Are you fucking serious right now, Gayram? Who the fuck cares what that asshat did, it was just a—”

Nathan cuts himself off suddenly with a grunt that tickles Warren’s ear as the hug brings his face into Nathan’s shoulder, and Warren can feel him struggling not to push Warren off of him. But he doesn’t—he lets the hug Warren springs on him hold, and his hand even lifts up to rest on the back of Warren’s shoulder after a few seconds of awkward one-sided action that Warren doesn’t even attempt at caring about.

The hug only lasts a handful of minutes—much, much shorter than the last time he had hugged Nathan in the freezing rain of the missing storm—but it’s more than enough for Warren to pull himself back together again, and when he pulls away, he knows Nathan can see the relief expressed on Warren’s face.

“Thanks, Nathan,” says Warren, grinning broadly for the first time that night. He nudges Nathan with his shoulder, which rewards him with a Nathan-brand glare. “You’re a wizard at handling that shit. I’d probably be sobbing in a pit without you right now. You’re the man.”

“Whatthefuckever,” Nathan mutters in response, turning his attention back on the movie that’s already halfway done. He doesn’t offer anything more, no punches or spit insults or anything of the like. Just the simple phrase and a switch of attention to something not himself, and Warren accepts this with ease. Because that’s just Nathan’s way of saying “you’re welcome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: don’t dress as La Catrina, kids (unless you happen to be part of the culture, depending on who you ask—some people don’t care, but don’t be 2013 in any case)


	5. Shark Bait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHOOPS GUESS WHO GOT HER DATES MIXED UP my bad
> 
> this chapter is f'ing huge tho. why did I ever make this a thing.
> 
> also so I know this chapter kind of doesn't fit or flow right with the rest of the fic but. I tried, okay. I really did. I swear.
> 
> (I'm sorry)

“I’m not going to the damn party, Nathan,” Warren protests, not for the first time, when Nathan tells him he was booked for the night and wasn’t going to hang out with Max and Kate like Warren had just explained to him. “I don’t even _like_ Vortex Club parties.”

“Boo fucking hoo,” Nathan replies with ease, slipping another photo into the portfolio he held in his lap. It’s one of several that Warren had been helping him organize for an upcoming event the replacement photography teacher was holding before Winter Break. “You keep skipping out on my parties, Gayram. If you don’t have a good time you’re going to get cracked out on yourself and assault someone and no one needs a nerdgasm on their ass like that.”

“I’ve been to more of your stupid parties than you even know, Nathan. _God_.” Warren holds the photo up, trying to get more of the artificial light of the lamp to reflect off of the black and white of the subject in it. “I went to your worst one like six times because of the whole loop bullshit pushing me into terrified repetition, give a guy a break! Besides, I have other ways of having a good time to rest my brain, and they don’t include alcohol. Or traumatizing reminders, thanks.”

Nathan doesn’t respond, but Warren can hear the soft, sharp noises of the photos sliding against one another as they’re sorted, and Warren takes this to mean he’s won the argument. Which is only solidified when Nathan doesn’t bring up the party again and instead starts giving quiet, half-spit orders on how to work the photos together like he wanted. It ends when Victoria barges in to grab Nathan—complaining of unanswered messages from a phone Warren hadn’t even seen Nathan touch recently—for some emergency regarding … music? Food? Something like that. Warren doesn’t know exactly, because Victoria doesn’t give all the details at full volume and only glares at Warren when she catches him trying to listen in, but Nathan leaves with her once she’s explained, and Warren’s left to the photos alone.

It’s as he’s setting the folders down on Nathan’s desk for him to see later, though, that Warren notices something he really doesn’t want to see. And that Nathan didn’t want Warren to see, judging by the placement.

It’s Nathan’s pill bottles that catch his eyes, scooted behind his laptop out of relative sight, which was the part Warren was used to. What he wasn’t used to, though, was the quantity of them—or the fact that Warren knew Nathan never had _three full bottles_ at once.

Nathan hadn’t been prescribed anything new recently, so there was no reason for him to have three full bottles of the same medication like this. Not in the middle of the school year where he could easily get more if he needed it.

So why did Nathan have them? And why, when Warren checked the date on the bottles, did they date back as far as the _middle of August?_

What the fuck?

What the hell was Nathan doing?

 _It’s not a big deal, really_ , Warren thinks to himself as he shuts Nathan’s door behind him, knowing full well he felt no need to lock it when he was who he was. He’ll just ask Nathan to explain and it’ll all be good. Right?

That’s all he needed to do.

 

* * *

 

Nathan, however, proves hard to get a hold of.

**[3:59 PM] Dude you not taking your meds again?**

**[4:29 PM] I know you’re probably busy so just say yes for taking meds and no for not taking meds.**

**[4:31 PM] Nathan hello I’m typing to you.**

**[4:58 PM] I know you’re getting these and it’s a simple question. Just give me a yes or a no.**

**[5:28 PM] Nathan. What the fuck dude?**

**[5:30 PM] Are you still taking your meds Y/N**

**[5:31 PM] Don’t ignore this message.**

**[6:02 PM] NATHAN.**

**[6: 10 PM] Seriously, not even with the caps? Bullshit man. I’m worried over here and you’re giving me an Ice Age-era cold shoulder right now.**

**[6:31 PM] Nathan. Jesus Christ.**

**[6: 42 PM] Fine.**

And that was how, not even two hours later, Warren had found himself dead center in the thrumming music of the Vortex Club party that he had very much not wanted to go to. The very same party Nathan had tried to talk Warren into going to and Warren had so vehemently protested against attending.

Warren was here, Warren was upset, and Warren was … a beer down the hole. Because Justin had spotted him and handed him a red plastic cup full of something foul-smelling, and Warren had decided that if he was going to be here, he was going to be here on his terms.

Those terms, apparently, included a drink.

Warren sips on it as he makes his rounds of the pool, getting pushed away twice when he makes it to the VIP side of the party, until he finally decides no one was going to help him get into there when Nathan still wasn’t answering him and, well. Warren was done with waiting.

Warren was _very_ done with waiting.

He yells into the VIP area as loud as he can, Nathan’s name mingling with the music the DJ is putting out, and the rest that follows becomes a blur.

In retrospect, he really shouldn’t have had that beer.

 

* * *

 

Nathan is both drunk and high on something Warren can’t identify when he comes crashing out of the VIP area at Warren like a bull towards red, and Warren is two seconds away from busting a nut in frustration over Nathan’s inability to both put his own health first _or_ answer his damn phone. It’s a bad mix, and it’s only gaining to get worse.

They’re arguing—brought on by Warren immediately confronting Nathan about not taking his medicine before Nathan had even actually reached within hearing distance, and up to the point where Nathan’s backed him against the wall—spitting words and building unanswered questions upon one another, and then one of them starts yelling.

Well, yelling louder. They’re already yelling to be heard over the music, because they’re at a Vortex Club party and Vortex Parties are never anything short of a Hot Mess™ in the making. The single beer Warren had consumed constituting as _one too many_ beers (he was working on the lightweight stat of his vitals, okay, it was a work-in-progress) before engaging in the conversation he will later understand that he should _not_ have taken part in, because anger plus Warren plus alcohol equated to a mistake _begging_ to happen.

Warren was getting far too riled up in the heat of it all, which really wasn’t hard with the tension he’d been riding on after the visions he’d kept having. And as if those hadn’t already been a recipe for disaster in Warren’s making, the party and its participants had done nothing more than bake it into a cake of anger that zipped white-hot through Warren’s veins, the scene itself being nothing more than a memory of the world ending.

And Nathan! Nathan wasn’t helping anything. Warren had enough to worry about with the visions, Nathan did _not_ need to add to it by not taking his medicine! And not answering Warren’s texts when he asked about the bottles? Warren had saved Nathan’s _life_. Didn’t that warrant some sort of explanation when he asked for one?

And yet, without the responses Warren had hoped for, nothing had pointing to the truth, and all it did was upset Warren further and further.

Thus, by the time Nathan had finally emerged from his sacred VIP section, Warren was grinding his teeth to dust in frustration, the alcohol having fueled him until his buzz had all but fully burned away into a haze of fury he couldn’t remember ever feeling before. Which brought him back to where he was now: nearly-pinned to a suddenly-abandoned section of the wall, buzzed off his ass with fury, and yelling at the person he had thought he’d started fixing for good when he’d managed to take the storm away.

Nothing good could have ever come from this, but Warren won’t realize that until after.

In the rush of everything, Warren won’t remember which of them it is that starts yelling first, nor will he remember the words that are said under the pounding thrum of the noise pouring from the speaker just above them, but Nathan is caught somewhere between a loose fury and a wired energy, and Warren knows he’s getting _extremely_ pissed off at him, but he can’t seem to stop himself from pushing it too far. Because Nathan was _always_ angry, and this time it was Warren’s turn to be pissed.

Maybe he pushes because he’s so tired of Nathan not thinking of himself—despite the fact everyone around them claims the exact opposite of him, that he never thought of anyone else and that he was nothing but the rich bitch of Arcadia Bay; despite the fact he _lets_ them think that, even if it wasn’t true, wasn’t even  _remotely_ true—or because he just wants Nathan to _listen_ to him for once, because _dammit_ he didn’t save his life for him to turn right around and _ruin it_ the  _moment_ he  _stops looking_.

Oh, Warren is _pissed_. It’s a pure, hurting sort of anger he’s never felt before in his life, and it’s an anger he doesn’t know how to wield. But he uses it.

It’s only later that he’ll wish he hadn’t.

“You were almost arrested for _murder_ , Nathan!” Warren spits now, his hand splayed over Nathan’s shoulder to keep him from leaving, and, while he won’t remember all the words that’ll be said between them, he’ll remember the hurt and the ferocity he had put behind the ones he spoke now. “Murder! Jefferson was going to use that against you, and you willingly stopped it all on your own? What if I hadn’t known to tell you! If you hadn’t been taking your medicine when they—when they tested you—you could have— _they_ could have—ACK!” Warren chokes, jostled by the sudden force of Nathan pushing him into the wall just behind them with the weight of his arm across Warren’s throat.

“Why the fuck do you think you have _any_ authority to mouth off to me about shit you don’t even _understand_ , Graham?” Nathan retorts, his breath hot and burning with the smell of alcohol. Warren tries to angle his face away, but it’s difficult when Nathan is so damn close. Nathan’s arm, thankfully, drops from where it’s barred against Warren to press instead on either side of him, but now he feels caged in. He can’t move his arms. He doesn’t like the feeling; it’s freaking him out. “You don’t know anything! You think living through a little bit of hell makes you some sort of life expert, huh? Some sort of motherfuckin’ deity of survival? Bitch, I got news for you, you don’t know _shit_ about what it does to me. Any of it!  You have no fucking clue what you’re even talking about! You don’t know _anything_.”

“I know it keeps you _safe_!” Warren half-yelps, and Nathan goes silent, staring at him. The flashing lights around them distort any possible color that might be attributed to Nathan’s appearance, but Warren thinks he might have gone pale. Or green.

Or, really, any color on the rainbow spectrum. The lights were ridiculous. If the situation weren’t curdling something akin to catastrophe in Warren’s gut, he might have found the whole thing funny.

It’s at this point Warren can see the storm brewing right in Nathan’s pupils as they bore daggers into his own, but he’s too tightly-wound and his brain doesn’t connect with his mouth in time to call ceasefire, and he ends up saying words he knows he wouldn’t have said under other circumstances. Words he doesn’t even remember in his sobriety because he regrets them the moment they leave his lips.

Warren witnesses something snap in Nathan as the words render him utterly silent, and then Nathan’s shoving himself up against Warren with venom pouring from his lips before Warren even really understands what it is he’s just done. Not a single sentence registers in his ears over the buzzing of panic that starts up, all he knows is that whatever Nathan’s saying to him is hurtful and cruel from the tone he uses to wield his verbal weapon, and, for once, Warren thinks he might actually deserve it.

But he also just wants Nathan to stop, and he’s drunk enough not to think beyond that want before acting.

“Cut it _out_ , Nathan!” Warren finds himself yelling, hands flat against the wall that honestly might be fixing his poor posture at this point, he’s been crammed up against it so long. “Cut the fucking scare-tactic bullshit!”

“Scare-tactic bullshit?!” Nathan snarls, then laughs in a low, throaty way that Warren’s surprised he can even hear. It distracts him, just for a moment, from the rest of _Nathan_ happening in front of him. “You want bullshit, Graham? I’ll give you _bullshit_ —!”

Nathan raises a fist and gathers the fabric of Warren’s shirt in it, his mouth still pouring poison that doesn’t register in words, and Warren, furious and panicked and hurt for reasons beyond just whatever it is Nathan is saying to him, grabs the back of Nathan’s head and closes the gap under grounds he thinks might have to do with distracting Nathan from beating the shit out of him right then and there.

It’s not unlike the method Nathan had used against him once upon a time, but in his intoxicated state he misjudges the action he’d only ever managed to execute twice on the very same target before changing his choices to change the timeline. Warren knew that simply getting too close just wouldn’t cut it when he hadn’t ever managed to actually invoke fear in Nathan since the day he’d decided to save his ass from a certain psycho serial killer and, well, overcompensation had happened, and Warren’s mouth had come right back into play. Just not quite how it had moments before.

It wasn’t a problem to Warren, though. He’d seen it in a movie once or twice and it had worked pretty decently for the people who had tried it. No one, at least from what Warren remembers, ended up with a bloody lip for their efforts. Then again, no one in the movies had been trying to use it on Nathan Prescott, so maybe this had been an outlier, and a bloody lip didn’t usually occur to those attempting the distraction.

It did, however, occur to Warren. Nathan hadn’t even given the accidental kiss a chance; he’d clamped his teeth down right on Warren’s bottom lip and drawn blood, then shoved away from Warren and stalked back into the VIP section of the party, where Warren couldn’t follow. Warren was too busy smothering his pain and trying to find punctures in his lip to even bother attempting, the blood pouring down his chin to drip onto the tile he had fallen to, staining his shirt and pants along the way.

Well, the plan had  _technically_ worked. Nathan hadn’t hit him, and he had left instead of continuing the argument. That really didn’t make Warren feel better in the moment, though.

“Shit,” he hisses to himself, wincing when it only pulls his lip, because _fuck_ it hurts. This was the second time Nathan had given him a bloody lip (well, okay, theoretically the first time had been Warren’s doing, but it was as a reaction to Nathan, so it sort of counted), but holy hell, Warren’s pretty sure he could thread some hoops in the holes he was now sporting thanks to Nathan’s ministrations. Does he need stitches? Could you even get stitches for lip punctures? Was he going to have Nathan’s teeth imprints as _scars_ on his fucking lip?

Jesus Christ. This is _not_ what he signed up for.

Hand cupped beneath his chin to try and catch the dripping blood before it got everywhere, Warren stumbles to his feet and weaves around the mingling bodies of the oblivious party-goers in search of the bathroom, knocking shoulders with more than one on the way there. They completely ignore him, too busy in whatever they were doing when he ambled up and disrupted their personal space to break their stride and give him any attention.

He has to brush away both Stella and Hayden (because Hayden apparently talked to him without Nathan around now—it was weird) when he rushes past them, both of them asking what had happened before he can reach the intended destination, but, thank god, the bathroom still has toilet paper _and_ paper towels in it when he gets there, so he’s able to staunch the bleeding somewhat before he makes a total murder scene of both his shirt and the floor of the bathroom. When he spits into the sink, there’s more blood than there is saliva, and his mouth looks like something from a B-horror movie when he opens it.

“Son of an Ewok,” Warren mumbles into the mirror he’s basically pressing his face against as he assesses the damage, the cool curved point of the sink making good friends with his hipbone in a somewhat painful way. He ignores the feeling in favor of getting as close to the mirror as physically possible, gingerly moving his lip this way and that against his teeth to try and tell if any were showing through the potential rips in his flesh. It takes him a good five minutes to determine the damage. His appearance alone scares off two people who attempt to wash their hands while he’s busy monopolizing one of the mirrors, but he kind of enjoys that.

Turns out Nathan didn’t _actually_ puncture through his lip, but you would have thought he did from the way the things wouldn’t stop bleeding. Was it normal for lips to bleed this much? Warren thinks he still might need stitches. How was he going to explain this to his parents? “Yeah, just kissed a guy so he wouldn’t smash my face in and it backfired in a way movies never prepared me for, no biggie. Just sew me up and send me on my way. Lesson learned, I promise. No more psychopath smooches.”

Yeah. That would _totally_ work.

“Dude, who are you talking to?” Warren startles away from the mirror, his fist of bloody paper still hovering by his chin, and finds Trevor (was this guy everywhere?) staring at him in sudden yet mild alarm. Warren thanks the gods that Trevor’s a pothead, because panic was the last thing he wanted to deal with right now, and Trevor already looked a little green beneath his uneasy expression. “Whoa. What the hell did you in?”

“A shark,” Warren says bluntly, dabbing his lip again. Trevor’s alarm grows. Warren has to resist the urge to grab him by the shirt and ask him if his brain cells were really worth it. “Jesus, does it matter? I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, is this normal?”

“I don’t know,” Trevor responds calmly, hands in the air and eyes firmly on Warren’s mouth. “Does it feel normal?”

Warren turns and stares at him, perplexed and a little dumbfounded at the question. “ _Feel_ normal? No! It fucking hurts!” How would he know what would feel normal, anyway? It’s not like he did this regularly. What kind of asswit question was—

Warren stops his train of thought with a jolt, blinking at himself in shock. What the hell?

He was too angry. _Way_ too angry. And taking it out on someone who just wanted to know what was going on.

This wasn’t how he would have handled things before. This wasn’t the kind of person he was.

… Was it? Did Warren even know himself anymore?

Had he known himself in the first place?

“Man, I think you need to …” Trevor starts after watching Warren unconsciously sway against the line of sinks. He steps forward and grabs the hand holding the bloody paper, then guides it to Warren’s mouth and pushes with enough pressure to make it sting sharply. Blood swirls along the underside of Warren’s tongue.

“Ow!” he yelps, startled, then nearly chokes on the blood as it hits the back of his throat.

“Sorry,” Trevor mumbles, pulling away long enough to let Warren spit in the sink. The moment Warren’s done, though, he’s back again, and he doesn’t lessen on the pressure. Warren’s hand, the original bearer of the paper towel ball, stays in Trevor’s grip the entire time, and Warren’s too distracted (and still slightly too drunk) to think about removing it. Trevor’s red-rimmed eyes stare holes into their combined grasp on the paper towel wad, but Warren thinks it’s in concentration, not because of the way his fingers were fitted right between the spaces of Warren’s as he held the paper firmly to Warren’s wounds, his (relatively) clean fingers a stark contrast to Warren’s bloody ones.

… Which Warren’s now staring at himself. Quickly, he flicks his eyes away from the mirror and settles for staring intently at the smeared red adorning the tiles below the sink instead, groaning at himself inwardly. He really needed to stop attending Ladies’ Night with the girls (who was he kidding, he attended _all_ nights with the girls, Nathan was too picky about his tastes most of the time), because the romcoms were starting to get to him.

 _Trevor_ , Warren? _Really?_

“Head wounds are a bitch,” Trevor continues slowly, oblivious to Warren’s inner turmoil and fairly rude repulsion. “Pretty sure you’re supposed to apply pressure to get these to stop.”

Warren … knew that. He _knew_ that. Really, he did.

But he doesn’t mention that fact, and he doesn’t stop Trevor from holding his makeshift gauze to the wounds, because _Warren_ had been the idiot in this situation, and sometimes it was just easier to let someone else take the reins. Instead, he slumps back against the sink and closes his eyes, fingers of his free hand curling around the cold porcelain to anchor himself in, and lets Trevor do the work.

The party outside is loud, and the booming music echoes into the spacious tiled area that constituted as what was technically the locker rooms, though only the bathroom area was accessible during parties. Probably in an attempt to prevent accidental pregnancies in the dark corners the area offered, but Warren thought that was pretty useless when most of the students lived on campus anyway and could just take it to their dorm rooms.

But, really, who was he to question the decisions made or the logic behind them? He’d just pulled a ridiculously reckless move and paid the price for it, he wasn’t exactly up for candidacy as the next Head of High Vulcan. Not to mention, with the recent visions screwing with him, he wasn’t exactly in the best mental state he’s ever been in.

God, his life was a mess.

“I think it’s stopped,” Trevor says after a while, pulling the paper away for a final time. “Fuck, bro. That’s harsh,” he remarks. There’s a tinge of sympathy to his voice. Warren slides open tired eyes to see Trevor peering at his lip with his own mouth twisted in a grimace.

“Yeah,” Warren agrees wearily, wincing when his mouth continues to sting from the movement. “But it was a stupid thing I did. Kind of deserved it. Thanks for the help.”

Trevor shrugs, finally releasing Warren’s trapped hand. Warren tosses the saturated ball of paper into one of the trash cans, scowling at the drying blood still on his fingers. “You looked like you could use a buddy,” says Trevor. He turns away and starts washing his hands, watching Warren through the mirror in front of him. “You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” Warren says. _At least until I have to explain it to Max, and then Chloe,_ Warren adds on silently. He hadn’t thought of a perfect excuse just yet (the same one he’d used the last time he’d punctured his lip would probably be a good idea, though falling down the stairs was even better, if he could think of some remote stairs to blame), but Nathan was completely out of the cards without question. He knew what Chloe was capable of, even if he had never witnessed it, and he wouldn’t doubt Chloe would give Nathan hell if she ever found out he was involved. Knowing Nathan and how he tended to handle confrontation, it just wasn’t a good idea. He’d be asking for the start of a war by sic’ing those two against one another, and it just wasn’t worth the battle.

“If you need any medical shit for that while it heals,” Trevor continues as he dries his hands, “I can hook you up. Dana’s wicked with a kit, she fixes me all the time. Skating, you know?”

Warren doesn’t, but he nods all the same. “Thanks, Trevor,” he says, and he means it. “Seriously. I appreciate it.”

Trevor salutes him as he heads towards the exit back into the pool area. “Just stay away from sharks, my man.”

Warren huffs a laugh at that, unsure if it could be followed, but it turns out Trevor’s advice isn’t needed. He doesn’t see Nathan again the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

_Jesus Christ, he kissed Nathan Prescott._

Warren Graham, young nerd science brain of Blackwell Academy, had momentarily smooched the high rich bitch king of Arcadia Bay … and Nathan had apparently done _nothing_ by ways of humiliating Warren with it.

He’d done nothing concerning Warren period since the party, but that really was beside the point. Warren had _kissed_ Nathan. Accidentally, sure, but Nathan. _Prescott_. And Nathan hadn’t set forth a single gossipy rumor about it?

What the fuck?

Okay, Warren understands that this doesn’t really constitute as Nathan  _kissing_ him, but his mind catalogues it before he can think to right it, and he doesn’t bother going back on it. Mostly because it’s Nathan, and anything less than getting brutally bitten from engaging in mouth-to-mouth contact with him just wouldn’t seem logical. Warren only wishes he had thought of that fact _before_ trying his distraction tactic. More because of the reactions the bandages he slaps on his lip brings, which get more and more annoying the more he has to deal with them, but also because Nathan refuses to speak to Warren from that night on, and it’s actually driving Warren a minor amount of nuts.

He’d sent Nathan a lot of texts that night the fight happened, and none had been answered, but the texts he sends the day that follows are also ignored, even after Warren outright asks Nathan if he’s still alive. That _really_ tugs on his persistence. Did being the better man _never_ have a reward? No wonder no one ever bothered.

But more texts are ignored as the days trickle on, and it’s to the point where Nathan refuses to even look at Warren when he sees him in the halls, using people like a remorseless Victoria and a sympathetic-yet-dutiful Hayden as shields whenever Warren gets near and acting like he can’t hear Warren calling his name. It’s so sudden a change that, for a moment, Warren even debates asking (begging) Victoria for help, because he doesn’t know what the hell to do when he can’t even get any response from Nathan and she knew him better than anyone Warren had access to.

Okay, yeah, maybe it had only been like three actual days since the fight, and maybe both Max and Chloe had basically said “good riddance” to Nathan’s sudden departure from contact after catching wind of a rumor—which had been started up by the few people that had actually witnessed the fight (thankfully, no one had seen Nathan almost bite Warren’s lip off, so his excuse of stairs and epic tripping was still pretty sound)—about Nathan turning on Warren, but Nathan’s friendship was something Warren thought he had achieved. He didn’t spend every waking moment with Nathan, sure, and Nathan got pissy more than half of the time they did hang out, causing him to blast Warren at full power, but ignoring him? For days? The fight had been a bad one, and both of them had clearly fucked up, but Warren was starting to feel more and more guilty the longer Nathan acted like their bonding hadn’t happened.

He just wanted to say he was sorry and have it accepted. Why was that so hard?

Four days would be Warren’s limit and, despite the fact it would be a Tuesday that night, Warren decides he’s going to camp out outside Nathan’s—and, well, his own, since he was right across the hall—room and _make_ him talk to him.

That had to work, right?

Yeah, no. It really didn’t. But Warren tries anyway.

He knows Nathan has a Vortex Club meeting that night, so he’ll be getting back later than he would if he were just spending the rest of the day with Victoria. Warren uses this to his advantage—and by that, he pretty much just makes sure he’s seated on the floor right outside Nathan’s door about an hour after classes ended, because the meetings had varying lengths and Warren didn’t want to miss his chance. It’s once he’s been sitting there a good forty-five minutes that Warren realizes he probably should have asked Hayden for his number (manipulative, yes, but if Hayden wanted to be nice to Warren, then Warren was going to use that) so he could have some sort of indication of when the meeting would _actually_ end, but now it was too late for that.

Despite the fact he had lived through a time loop that pretty much required a form of planning to get out of, Warren really wasn’t the best at planning things out in a way that benefitted him. Which, really, made too much sense in retrospect.

The first hour ticks by; Warren spends it texting Max, Kate, and Chloe (in pure meme, an accidental challenge Warren had initiated and Chloe had taken up in full), and hunting through Reddit threads for old _Lost_ conspiracy theories, because why not. Twice people have asked him what the hell he’s doing (Luke, who tells him to just forget Nathan, and Steve, who seems to find the whole thing amusing and wants a photo), but mostly people have just filtered in and out of their rooms and left Warren to sit alone in the hall.

The second hour brings immense boredom, a very numb ass, and, at the forty-one minute mark, the blessed form of Trevor. Again.

“Hey, Shark-bait!” Warren winces at the nickname, his wave stuttering with the movement before his hand falls to his side. Unceremoniously, Trevor drops to the floor beside Warren and fastens a grin onto him. “What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting for Nathan.” Warren gestures to the door with a nod, just in case Trevor didn’t connect the dots.

Trevor’s grin droops. “Yo, heard that rumor. Dunno what you’d do to invoke that Prescott wrath though. Is it true?”

“The fight?” Warren shrugs. “Yeah.”

“Dude, is that why you were bleeding out in the bathroom? Holy shit! How did he get you like that?” Trevor asks, gesturing first to his own mouth with his thumb and then mimicking the gesture over Warren’s. “How do you even get something like those?”

“Are you asking me how I got these scars?” Warren says, smirking. Trevor looks blankly back at him.

“Uh, yeah, I guess. I wouldn’t really call them scars yet. They look like scabs.”

Warren sags back against the door with a groan of defeat. “I feel so underappreciated here.”

Trevor’s phone goes off, interrupting whatever he had been about to say, and his face lights up when he looks at the screen. “Gotta go, man,” he says, slapping Warren on the shoulder and standing up. “Dana’s out and we have a date. Don’t get in anymore fights, ‘kay?”

“I don’t know, I’ve got a taste for blood now, I don’t think you can hold something like me back,” Warren says sarcastically, ignoring the minor spike of panic that jabs him in the gut. If Dana was out, that means Nathan was, and he was probably going to be back any minute.

Trevor laughs. “Whatever you say, man. Later.”

And then he’s gone, and Warren’s left sitting on the floor outside the dorm room of the guy he’d willingly beaten up in timelines that he wasn’t living in anymore. Suddenly jittery with nerves, Warren pulls himself to his feet and turns to Nathan’s door and debates his options.

Which, honestly, was one of two: stay or go.

If he stayed, it could end badly. Nathan could get angry and start a fight—one Warren likely wouldn’t retaliate in, because Nathan was _not_ the person he’d been those other times, and Warren was not going to hit someone he’d managed to become so close to, not over something so stupid as medicine. (Though, seriously, that was a talk that needed to happen, and Warren wonders why Nathan’s therapist hadn’t noticed. Unless they had? What was the protocol for something like that? No. Distractions—stop it Warren.)

If he stayed, Nathan could also just push him aside and abscond into his room, which would render this all null.

But if Warren left … what would that accomplish? It might be the safer option of the two, but if Warren really wanted to get Nathan back on his side and talking to him, running away was _not_ the option. Nathan wouldn’t have done that to Warren, not when he really needed him. And Warren did need him; he couldn’t let this fight last, lest he be left to his own devices if another vision caught him. Nathan was his confidant. Nathan was who Warren went to. Nathan, Warren needed in his life.

Warren couldn’t let this keep going. Nathan was involved. Again. Involved in something Warren didn’t necessarily want him to he, but had to accept the fact that involvement was to Nathan like The Force was to Jedi.

Why did it seem like every time Nathan was involved, as an enemy or as a friend, Warren got sucked into engagement with him whether he liked it or not? What was he, a Nathan magnet?

Was _that_ why he’d been the one to suffer through that loop?

Well, no. That wouldn’t have made sense, because Jefferson was the loop, not Nathan. Nathan had just been connected to Jefferson, and therefor been the easiest route to capturing Jefferson before he could kill the people he killed in the past loops.

… Right?

Why did that … suddenly not sound so right to Warren? That’s what he had been going on, and that’s what had made sense. Going on that logic was how he got out of that manifestation of actual Hell he’d been thrown into, that had to be right. So why did it suddenly sound just … not?

Why did Warren—

“If you don’t fucking move right fucking now, I’m going to decorate my door with your fucking  _teeth_.”

Warren startles with a jolt, whipping to the side to find Nathan glaring daggers at him and looking like he’d keep to his promise if needed. Warren clutches the front of his shirt, willing his heartbeat not to puncture a hole in his chest, and anchors himself against Nathan’s door with the other hand to keep from outright collapsing.

“ _Nathan_ ,” he wheezes.

Nathan’s eyes, formerly on Warren’s, flick towards Warren’s mouth and stick, widening from where they’re focused on what is undoubtedly Warren’s scabs. Surprisingly, all the blood seems to drain from Nathan’s face and, for a moment, Nathan looks utterly shocked. It’s wiped clean from his features not long after it arrives and Nathan returns to glaring, but the blood doesn’t return, and he looks shaken and far less aggressive than he had just a minute before.

“I’m sorry,” Warren says as soon as he’s sure Nathan’s not going to smash his face in. Nathan blinks, then scowls.

“Yeah, I got the damn memo,” Nathan spits. “Like thirty fucking times.”

“You won’t answer me!” Warren exclaims, holding his hands out. “Come _on_ , Nathan,” Warren pushes when Nathan’s glare is deviated to the wall beside him. “I didn’t mean to do all that. I got worried and I thought shit and I started thinking about what could have happened if I _hadn’t_ known and what if that messed it all up? What if that had been a key? Or what if it hadn’t meant anything but it could have convicted you or something and then it would have been on me because _I’m_ the one who did this four fucking times so _I_ should know—What?”

“I asked if I did that,” Nathan repeats just as quietly has he had the first time he said it. Warren’s brain stutters away from his rant but fails to comprehend what Nathan’s talking about until he lifts a finger and points at his own mouth.

“Oh,” Warren says dumbly. His thumb shoots up to self-consciously finger the scabs and his tongue automatically moving to press on the inside and look around for holes he already knew weren’t there. Nathan’s eyes watch unblinkingly. “Yeah. You’ve got some power in those chompers, dude. Did you know head wounds bleed a lot, even if it’s just your lip? The swelling is finally going down, but it was pretty funny to look at for a few days there. I would look _horrible_ with lip injections.”

Nathan remains silent, his eyes still firmly on Warren’s mouth, and Warren drops his hand when he remembers he’s not supposed to mess with the scabs. The silence stretches, plainly uncomfortable, and Warren shifts on his feet the longer it goes, unsure if he should break it.

“Jesus fuck,” Nathan finally whispers, just as Warren decides he didn’t want the quiet anymore. “I didn’t mean to do that. Did it hurt a lot?”

“Like a goddamn bitch,” Warren answers proudly. “Kind of upset you didn’t go straight through, I think I would look badass with some snake-bites.”

The face Nathan makes tells Warren he thinks otherwise. “You need to lose the pathetic virgin aesthetic first. It won’t work with metal.”

Warren stops himself mid-eye-roll, suddenly realizing they’d fallen back into their comfortable banter. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?” Warren asks tentatively.

Nathan looks away. “Fuckin’ looks like it, doesn’t it?”

Warren grins. “You’re forgiven too, then,” he says, then snickers when Nathan looks back at him with narrowed eyes. Warren takes a step to the side, freeing Nathan’s door to access once again. “Also?” he adds on while Nathan moves to unlock his door (which, apparently, he had started locking after the fight—but Warren wasn’t thinking about that right now, dammit). “Learned my lesson. You were a shark in a past life, man.”

That gets Nathan to smirk. “And you were a pussy.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Warren protests, pushing his way into Nathan’s room behind him. The door shuts to total darkness, and when Nathan turns the light on again, Warren notices immediately that he’s holding one of the bottle of pills that had started this all, and his throat constricts with guilt all over again.

“Oh,” he says simply, then swallows. Nathan rattles the bottle, looking at the pills within the florescent casing, then shakes his head and goes to drop into his couch. He jerks his head for Warren to join him, and Warren doesn’t even hesitate.

“I was going to talk to you about it after the party, shitdick,” Nathan mutters under his breath once Warren’s settled, but not so low that Warren can’t hear him say it.

“What?” Warren says, but because he doesn’t understand, not because he can’t hear.

“I was going to tell you. After the party. These bottles are full of the meds I was supposed to take before …” He trails off, no longer needing to state the incident for Warren to know it instinctively.

“But the dates on them,” Warren protests after a moment, taking the bottle from Nathan’s grip and turning it around. The same date is still stamped right where Warren remembered seeing it. “They’re from more than a month ago.”

Nathan tilts his head in Warren’s direction, eyes hooded and eyebrows raised. “Really, Gayram? Stop acting like a dumbass. You’re the one who caught on to the fact I wasn’t taking my shit regularly.”

Oh. Right.

“Those _full_ _bottles_ are from all the times you skipped out?” asks Warren after he’s had a split-second wince at his inability to deduce. He used to be so good at that.

Nathan only shrugs. “I skipped a lot. Added all the extras to one. Why do you think I was so cracked out when you intervened on me that day?”

“Kinda thought that was just how you were,” Warren mumbles. He doesn’t say that it _was_ kind of just how Nathan was. Sometimes. But it does make a lot more sense now, because Nathan had been _bad_. “Why do you even still have those? Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s not illegal to have medicine prescribed to me, asshat. Those are the bottles I stashed when I had to hide the fact I was skipping from my asshole dad. Couldn’t ship me off to rehab if I still got my refills every month, right?”

That … was not right. There were so many other reasons Nathan’s dad could have interfered, and refills wouldn’t have been the curbing factor if anyone had found out how seriously bad Nathan had become. His dad must have had his own reasons for not doing anything. Or maybe he just hadn’t known.

No, Warren automatically corrects himself, he had known. He knew. There was nothing happening in Arcadia Bay that Sean Prescott didn’t know about. You know, minus the supernatural, but Warren knew that was for the best.

“Your family is so fucked up,” Warren says quietly, almost in disbelief. He couldn’t imagine having that for himself.

It’s not the right thing to say, though, because Nathan’s head snaps in Warren’s direction with a glare at the ready.

“My sister isn’t fucked up,” he hisses, and Warren winces automatically. Right. Nathan had a sister. Warren had totally forgotten about that.

… Had he even known that in the first place?

“Whoops, okay, bad wording,” Warren amends immediately. “Sort of forgot you had a sibling, actually. Your dad’s fucked up is what I actually meant. Maybe your mom, too, but I don’t want to make more assumptions here.”

Nathan quiets, his glare turning to the side. “Had to get it from somewhere, right?”

“You’re not fucked up, Nathan,” says Warren, but that only brings back the look Nathan had given him when he hadn’t been using his brain a few minutes before. “Okay, fine,” Warren amends, “you’re super fucked up. But so am I, and so is Chloe. And Max. And, hell, like half of this school. So what. We’re all fucked up.” Warren pauses. “Except, you know, your sister.”

That gets Nathan to nod slowly, as if accepting the statement. “I’m the fucked-up king of all of you bitches.”

Warren laughs, clacking his teeth together when Nathan elbows him. “All hail the fucked-up king of bitches!” Warren declares, and Nathan offers him a pleased look as he reaches for a discarded portfolio—one he must not have submitted. It’s full of black and white photos of the sky and the sea and the junkyard when he opens it, and one in particular catches Warren’s eye as Nathan shuffles them around.

“Hey,” Warren says as he reaches in to grab the photo. It’s of the side of the diner, where an old woman sits on the ground next to a stack of boxes. Warren peers at her face, but, for some reason, he can’t seem to place her. “Who is this?” Warren asks after a moment, holding the photo up for Nathan to see.

“Fucked if I know,” Nathan responds after a moment’s scrutiny. “Never seen her before in my life.”

“What? Dude, you took the picture.” Warren pulls it back again and stares at the woman’s face. Why did she look so familiar? _Why_ couldn’t Warren place her? “You have no idea who she is?”

“I’m sorry, did I fucking stutter?”

But if Nathan didn’t remember her despite taking the picture, and Warren couldn’t think of who she was despite the inkling that he’d seen her countless times before … what did that mean?

“I’m going to the diner tomorrow,” Warren declares, pocketing the photo. Nathan watches him do it, but he doesn’t demand Warren give the picture back.

“What?” he says instead, frowning. “Why? Birthday wishes?”

“You remembered?” Warren looks at Nathan in surprise. Nathan just gives him a look.

“You literally reminded me a fucking week ago, Graham.”

“Well, yeah, but.” Warren sheepishly rubs a hand over his hair. “I don’t know, I thought you’d forget.”

Nathan rolls his eyes. “Ye bitch of little faith.”

Warren pushes Nathan’s shoulder, but the conversation is done there, and when Warren leaves Nathan to help Max with some of her Chemistry homework, he leaves feeling significantly warmer than he had going in, and it’s not just because Nathan forgave him.

The photo, though, leaves a cold feeling in his gut, and, even though Max confirms she’s never seen the woman before either when he asks her, Warren feels like he knows the woman better than he can bring himself to understand.

But who is she? And why couldn’t anyone remember her?

That, Warren thinks, might just be the biggest question left to answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking. 
> 
> “Oh my god, Nova, did you _really_ keep _that_ scene in? _Really?_ ”
> 
> Look. Listen. That was _such_ a fun scene to write, even if it was just because anon wanted some lip action. I had to keep it! Yes, it’s been altered some and yes, it still sticks out like a HORRIBLE sore thumb but.
> 
> Bleh. I want it in. I need it for Trevor anyway, because somehow Trevor’s kind of become Warren’s Alyssa. And I like him.
> 
> (I’m sorry okay you can ignore this chapter and I'll still love all of you mwah)


	6. Diners, Drive-ins & Destruction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! Sorry this one took so long! Had one heck of a month (work slaughtered me and then I had not one, but two family emergencies) and so little time to edit this chapter, which is now the longest chapter of the whole fic so far.
> 
> It's still a little choppy in places, but it's the best I could do before I had to tell myself "Screw it! Good enough!" and let it free. Like with all my fics, I will definitely come back one day and further edit it, but for now this is what we've got.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

It’s a small event, Warren’s birthday. He wakes up that morning to Nathan sitting on the floor of his room in rumpled clothing, smelling of weed and stale cologne, idly affixing Warren’s character models in rude positions as he waited for Warren to rise. Warren unceremoniously grabs him by the fabric covering his shoulder as he pulls himself from his bed and hauls him off to the showers, leaving the Eleventh Doctor to be spit-roasted by the Green Lantern and the Hulk in peace.

(“Why did you have to pick the Hulk, of all your choices?” Warren had asked from one stall over, to which the answer had simply been “aesthetic girth.” Whatever the hell that was.)

It’s a school day, so there’s not much to expect as the time passes. Warren might once would have wanted to celebrate the birthday he’d been expecting to come for way too long, but now he just wanted to live through it and move on, so the relative calm that comes with everything soothes him and makes the day relatively enjoyable.

People who remember make idle well-wishes as they pass Warren: Max’s comes with a small smile, a hug, and a wink, followed by her making him promise to be in his room later for her to come by with his present; Alyssa’s with a shoulder-squeeze and a reference to a movie he knows he needs to re-watch. Hayden tries immediately to pick him up and Warren nearly wipes out tripping over Nathan’s shoe when he stumbles away from the open arms, Nathan guffawing loudly over the scene. Which was odd, Warren knew, because Nathan wasn’t usually so boisterous. But he was probably still stoned, and a laughing Nathan was better than a Nathan shaded with ire, so Warren didn’t think too deeply about it.

Brooke's well-wish is clipped and a little chilly when it comes, but the apology in her eyes when he asks her for a hug tells him she doesn’t really mean it. Warren knows she’s confused by the changes in Warren that had happened so suddenly, and she understands, deep inside, that Warren can’t seem to help the wince he gives when her hands settle down on his back only briefly. That it’s not her fault, this hardened person Warren’s become, nor is it Max’s, whom Brooke still seems to be put off by more times than not.

She lets him go with a sheepish, genuine half-smile and he counts that as a victory on his part, telling himself to pull her into his nerdy antics in the future when they become too much for even Max to weather (never mind Nathan, whose thresholds for Warren’s activities had grown significantly while cradled in the friendship that had manifested between them, but often still wasn’t enough for him to reason being put through whatever Warren was getting himself into) and he needs someone to bounce rhetoric off of. Brooke had liked that kind of stuff in the past, so Warren hoped his reluctance to fall back completely into his old, carefree ways wasn’t enough to deter her from letting him try again.

Oddly enough, Warren’s favorite birthday wish of the day comes from Trevor, who stops him in the hall on the way to his last class of the day by taking his hand as he passes and slipping something into his palm.

“Happy Birthday, bro,” Trevor offers quietly, smiling when Warren opens his hand to find a blue and black D20 nestled in the center, still warm from the heat of Trevor’s hand.

“What’s this?” Warren asks, blinking up at Trevor in confusion.

“My lucky die,” Trevor explains, his dopey smile broadening on his lips. “I used to crit on all the big bosses with that thing.”

Warren blinks at him again, but this time in surprise. Trevor? A D&D nerd? Yeah, right. “You play?” he asks all the same.

“Played,” Trevor corrects. “Had a game every weekend when I was a kid. Stopped when I got into school, didn’t have time to be a geek and a skater in one. I doubt many of these art snobs know how to DM a good campaign anyway. I kept the thing as a sort of lucky-fucky charm, but I think you’d get more use out of it. You’ve had a real rough time lately, man. Don’t think all of us haven’t noticed.”

That makes something warm bloom in Warren’s chest, and he smiles down at the die. “Thanks, Trevor,” he tells him earnestly. “I don’t really get to play anymore, but maybe I’ll try to DM something just so I can try this baby out.”

Trevor whoops, loudly, and the people chatting at the lockers behind him startle and give them a dirty look. “You’d be one badass Master with that big brain of yours, Shark-Bait,” Trevor says, his quiet tone from before forgotten. “I’d put my skateboard up for the night to experience that.”

He winks, and a surge of excitement rushes up Warren’s spine. He hadn’t played a game since getting into Blackwell, and he missed it. So much that his brain immediately aches with a want to brew up a situation short enough to entertain someone he had always assumed didn’t have the disposition (or the brains, if he was being honest—which really wasn’t fair to Trevor, considering how hard it was to get into Blackwell in the first place, Warren realizes) for a role-play tabletop game.

“Would you play if I came up with a campaign?” Warren blurts out, then curses himself internally. That wasn’t quite how he’d planned trying to coerce Trevor into playing a game with him. Now he just sounded over-eager.

But Trevor’s smile widens. “Me? Doing that nerdy shit?” He sounds like he’s mocking Warren with the tone he chooses, and Warren’s excited smile slips right from his face. But that’s his mistake, because Trevor wasn’t that kind of a person, and Warren _knew_ that. “Hell, why not? If the cool kids in the Vortex club can get away with hanging with the genius of the school, then why can’t I? You bring the campaign, I’ll bring the beer.”

“Really?” Warren can’t help himself, his voice cracks embarrassingly over the word, and Trevor’s perpetually red-rimmed eyes light up in amusement. Warren clears his throat, knowing it’s far too late to play it cool, but was going to try to anyway, because that was just the flavor of awkward he was. “I mean, yeah. Hell yeah. Give me a week or two and I’ll put the campaign together.” _Wait_ , his brain tags as soon as the words leave his lips, _finals_. “… And we’ll play right before the semester ends for Winter Break,” Warren amends quickly. Trevor nods his head once in understanding, then grins brilliantly.

“Dude, yes, it’ll be a dork date,” he exclaims, patting Warren roughly on the shoulder as he absconds into his classroom. “I’ll tell the guys.”

“The guys?” Warren repeats, startled, but Trevor’s already gone.

Guys? _What_ guys? Warren was going to ask Max and Chloe and Kate and maybe even Brooke, but _guys_?

What the hell had Warren just gotten himself into?

 

* * *

 

Warren has a free period placed at the end of the day in the form of a test he had no trouble finishing way before the allotted time, so he leaves the classroom with more than forty minutes to spare while most everyone else was still stuck inside. Without anyone to occupy his time and no real want to go back to his room and sit in the silence it offered, Warren decides to act on his declaration of the day before: going to the diner to look for that woman.

The Two Whales diner is far from barren when Warren meanders into it and slides into a booth, despite it being an hour where most of the student body back at Blackwell should still be in class and most people at work. Late lunch, Warren figures when he glances around, for the people too hungover on things stronger than alcohol and weed that had missed breakfast and the usual hour for lunch, but are too early for dinner. He doesn’t look any of them in the face as he turns back to the table he’s seated at, but they don’t exactly give him the chance to even if he had wanted to.

He realizes his fingers have started up a tapping against the laminated menu just as he’s curling them in a fist to stop making the gently punctuated noises, uncertain of why exactly he started up the uncharacteristic twitch in the first place. Usually it was Nathan who added the repetitive ambiance; Warren wasn’t really sure why he had unconsciously picked up the mantle in Nathan’s absence, but he figured it had something to do with nerves. He’s not given any more time to wonder on the matter before Joyce is on the scene and Warren’s forcing himself into a state of ease to keep her from going parental on him. Just like Chloe, sometimes Joyce was sharp right when Warren didn’t want her to be, and today wasn’t really the day he wanted to deal with that.

“Missing the posse today?” Joyce asks him cheerfully as she glides up to the table and sets a cup down, a near sing-song to her voice and a genuine look of cheer curling her lips. Warren wonders what’s got her in such a good mood as he watches her fill his cup before he really has a chance to greet her, let alone order the coffee in the first place. He decides that’s probably proof he’s been going here far too much in the past couple of months, and that he hasn’t altered his order enough to ever have a surprise in store for the waitress—not that he’s complaining. Being predictable wasn’t always a bad thing.

(If anything, being predicable had saved him in more instances than he could count, so he wasn’t about to badmouth it. _Especially_ not when the waffles were so damn good.)

It didn’t hurt anything that Joyce was also the kind of woman to subtly take all the broken kids that wander into her diner under her wing in a way that didn’t really obstruct their rebellious freedom—something she probably learned how to do from raising someone like Chloe, though it seemed like she didn’t use it on Chloe like she did on Warren—and definitely on Nathan, whom Warren thinks might not even realize she does it to him. She was subtle but stern in her ways, the type of diner waitress that belonged in a sitcom with far less catastrophic drama behind the curtains than her actual scene called for. She was almost a cliché.

Warren has wondered more than once if she had known she was going to die all those times she’d tried to protect him, within this very diner, in all the loops where the walls had collapsed in on them from the forces of the storm and ultimately crushed them all. She must have had an idea from the way she reacted, barring them all in and keeping them from leaving again.

He almost wishes he had thought to warn her in at least one of the loops, to save her somehow from the same destruction that had ended them all, but he had been too afraid of ruining things in a way that wouldn’t allow him to go back for so many of the repeated moments, and he hadn’t had the balls to potentially change the life of one person at the very last moment in exchange for the lives of so many others.

He hadn’t thought—

“Now that table might not be clean enough to show you the fairest of them all, but I’d be damned if you’d be able to see anything but yourself in that surface just by staring at it long enough.” Joyce’s voice cuts into Warren’s mental spiral, jarring him back to the present as he blinks his line of sight away from the table he now knows he’d been boring holes into. “Rough day?” she adds on when he blinks up at her as if coming out of a dream. “You made like a space cadet there, Warren. Are those bullies bothering you again?”

“What? No, no,” Warren protests as soon as he’s pulled himself back again. “No, I swear it wasn’t bullies. Last time _or_ this time. There are no bullies!” Warren protests, though not vehemently, when Joyce just narrows her eyes at him. “Chloe would have them hung in a way you’d only see in crappy horror movies if she caught them, never mind what Nathan would do. It’s just been a long week. Scout’s honor.”

Warren holds up his fingers in a salute he actually has the background to execute (only a year of it, sure, but Joyce doesn’t need to know that detail), but Joyce only shakes her head once and sighs in that way Warren knows to be a universal sign of exasperated acceptance, and he knows he’s free from the subject at least for now.

“At least tell me why you’re missing your bodyguards?” she relents, depositing the small containers of creamer next to the cup of coffee. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you in here alone like this.”

Warren tries not to frown, because even before he had started hanging out with his current circle of friends, he hadn’t exactly been t _hat_ regular at the diner. It had been more of a recent thing, especially as the loops had started becoming more exhausting to traverse. Before he had finally found the correct end, the diner had been nothing but a checkpoint to him, somewhere to reload his save file and try again, and Warren hadn’t exactly found any scrap of joy in visiting the place when he knew it to be his final resting ground in so many other loops.

But Joyce’s question still stands regardless of the fact, and Warren has no reason to leave her hanging.

“Free period,” he explains without looking at her, instead picking up the creamers to open and pour into his cup until it reached the nearly-white consistency he preferred. Nathan’s periodic accusation of Warren’s “coffee-flavored milk of lies crap” echoes in the back of his mind as he goes about the procedure, and it only makes Warren smile to himself for half a beat before continuing on with his explanation. “Everyone’s still in class right now, doing that artsy stuff they all love doing. Us science dudes can’t relate.”

“Right,” Joyce muses good-naturedly, the previous conversation seemingly forgotten already. “You’d think I’d flat out forgotten the school hours, been so long since Chloe’s had the opportunity to skip out on the endeavor.”

Despite the pleasant tone of her voice, Warren can tell from the underlying exasperation that Joyce isn’t exactly thrilled about Chloe’s continued lack of academic perusal, but he only allows himself a moment to realize that before he’s wincing over something else with his cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.

“I, uh,” he scrambles, the cup setting back down on the table with a slightly too-loud clink that only makes him wince a second time. “I … didn’t even think to ask Chloe if she wanted to come with me,” he ends up admitting, giving Joyce an apologetic look that’s followed immediately by a sheepish smile. It wasn’t a lie—he really hadn’t thought of Chloe at all. He was so used to Chloe being with Max that the idea of her being on her own and not also occupied with something while Max was in class hadn’t occurred to him until just now.

But Joyce is having none of it. “Don’t worry hun,” she tells him sweetly, waving the hand not holding the tray with the coffee pot at him dismissively. “I know my daughter can be a handful more than anyone else does. Taking her on without Max to calm her down and be a human buffer is a feat, and one I don’t blame you for not attempting. Love the girl, I’m so glad she’s back. Gives Chloe a much-needed side of common sense.” She shakes her head once in that motherly way Warren had never seen anyone replicate. “It’s nice to see the Prescott kid around without worrying he’ll be causin’ any kind of trouble, too.”

Warren looks up at Joyce in surprise at Nathan being brought into the conversation. “Yeah,” he amends, more to himself. “I guess he’s not as likely to do the sh—uh, stuff he likes to do with other people. Max and I aren’t really the type.”

“No, you are not,” Joyce agrees firmly. “And that’s music to my ears, I’ve had enough of either of those two getting into things they shouldn’t be getting into. Chloe doesn’t know how lucky she is to have me for a mother. Think of how she’d be treated if she were a Prescott and did the things she tried to do in these past years!”

Warren winces. “So I’ve been told. I hear Sean Prescott’s got a finger in everything around here and Nathan might as well be inching his way off of a cliff with anything he might do wrong in his dad’s eyes. I can’t imagine what would have happened in the Jefferson case if Nathan had been found guilty.”

Joyce’s expression hardens. “You don’t know those bastards like we do,” she tells him darkly, quietly, and chills run down Warren’s spine in turn. “I have no doubt they’d have sacrificed their son in the end if it better profited them, never mind what blood might be flowing in his veins. Poor kid’s got a lot on his shoulders, and more than enough for someone his age to be dealin’ with. He’s been doing a lot better since he’s been hanging with you guys.”

Warren doesn’t know what to say to that, so he only offers Joyce a nod before she turns to put his order in, leaving him to ponder over Nathan’s family for the short while it takes for her to return with his food. When she does, he asks her quickly if she’d look at the photo he pulls from his pocket before she can return to work and he can lose his nerve to ask.

“I wanted to talk to her, but Nathan can’t remember seeing her again after this picture,” Warren says by way of explanation as Joyce leans down to look. “We’re pretty sure she’s homeless and was hanging around here at one point, judging from the picture.”

There’s a flicker of recognition in Joyce’s eyes the second she sets them on the photo, but her lips turn down and the spark is gone before she’s even blinked in absolute unfamiliarity as to who the woman is.

“Now, I get a good dozen or so people filtering in and causing havoc on my shifts throughout the week, but I’ve been workin’ here a long time and I don’t remember ever seeing this woman before, homeless or not.” She shakes her head once, and Warren’s disappointment floods his senses for a second longer than he wants it to, causing Joyce to give him a sympathetic look. “Is she someone important to you? Have you tried the police?”

Warren swallows, all but full-on mentally scrambling to curb the conversation when Officer Berry’s head perks up the slightest of amounts from just beyond Joyce’s shoulder as he slides onto his usual barstool of choice. (Did this guy ever actually work? What was he always doing in this damn diner?)

“No, no,” he tells her hastily—maybe _too_ hastily, and he tries not to feel guilty about looking for someone he can’t explain the existence of when no one else has ever seen her before. He also tries not to wince over his shit excuse, because _wow_ it’s bad. And he thought he’d gotten better at lying after everything that’s happened. Apparently not.  “I just thought maybe I’d known her from something I did for a project, but I’ve never seen her around here before. I must have gotten her mixed up with someone else.”

“You’d be surprised at the people that filter in and out of this little place,” Joyce tells him, nodding at herself and collecting the empty packet of sugar Warren had unconsciously opened and dumped into his coffee at some point. “Maybe she was a wayward spirit flitting into the scene. Don’t give up hope,” she says with a wink, “maybe she’ll be back again one day.”

Something in Warren immediately makes him want to tell her that he hopes he never sees the woman again—despite never meeting her in the first place—but he doesn’t say anything, and Joyce leaves him be to his food and his picture, which he folds up before long and puts away with a sigh. Maybe Joyce was right, and maybe Warren needed to stop caring about someone that no longer mattered in his story—someone who maybe hadn’t mattered at all in the first place.

 _So why is she still bothering me so much?_ Warren’s mind questions just as that thought has finished manifesting, and he shoves a spear of waffle in his mouth, decidedly shutting that chilling train of thought away until further notice.

Once he’s finished with his food, Warren pays for his meal and thanks Joyce as he vacates the booth. It’s as he’s pulling his keys out of his pocket and walking towards his car, though, that the idea of checking around the diner for the woman occurs to him.

It doesn’t make _sense_ , exactly, to be bothering at all when no one else had seen her before, but Warren does anyway, and tries not to be disappointed when he doesn’t immediately find anyone loitering around the area he had hoped to find her in.

Well, not anyone human, but birds can’t speak, so they don’t offer much help to him as he traverses the side of the diner back to the parking lot for one last sweep. He still finds nothing.

Just as Warren’s deducing the effort as a lost cause, however, he turns towards the beach, and the sight that greets him turns the saliva in his mouth to glue.

There’s a singular, massive whale on the sand, not unlike there had been that day Warren had seen the three of them in a flash of a vision on the beach, but that’s not quite what gets Warren’s heart to falter in his chest as he unconsciously stumbles away from the sight before him.

No, what makes his heart palpitate is the sight of the streets coated in rubble and destruction, with the gas station, something so sturdily set in on the scene he had known for months now, nowhere to be seen.

The entire area is in ruins.

Wood, paper, roof tiles, things like pieces of piping and broken bits of the diner’s sign litter the road and the blacktop around him, and the shoreline is all but a crude nest of wreckage around the single dead creature left among it. The air around Warren is hot and wet and filled with a vibe of such palpable _wrongness_ that he chokes on his gasp of breath as the feeling engulfs him. A smell like storm and rot and anger and loss coats the inside of his nostrils, making him gag before the action of breathing is even completed.

It smells like destruction, and it feels like death.

Warren doubles over, his knees jarring against the pieces of plywood and broken buildings he’d been standing on just moments ago, and he wills himself to breathe before the panic engulfs him all at once and leaves him useless to his own self-wrought torture.

The storm had come. The storm had come, and the signs had been ignored and everyone and everything had been torn to shreds by the unyielding winds and ruthless lightning that had been the cyclone’s weapons of destruction. And Warren had done nothing to stop it.

Nothing had worked. Warren had been _wrong_.

He had saved no one. He had done nothing in the end to make things right.

This was the end that was destined to become, and this was the end that he had truly suffered.

Warren was dead. Warren had _died_.

Warren was _gone_.

Warren couldn’t breathe.

He claws at the front of his jacket, nails catching on the metal of its zipper in his vain attempt at relieving the crushing feeling that overwhelmed his body, pressing deep on his chest and keeping him from even beginning at a recovery from the all-encompassing shock. But, despite the phantom feeling that stole his coherence, there was nothing against his chest to be removed, and his efforts did nothing but take away breath he didn’t have to spare.

Warren. Couldn’t. _Breathe._

Warren was _dead._

“No,” he gasps to air that cares nothing for his doom, his words ghosting from his lips with no sound to support them even as he pushes on. “No, No. I fixed this! _I fixed all of this_!”

But the plea reaches nothing and no one. The rubble around him speaks of lives he couldn’t save, of people he should have warned. This was a world where Warren had done nothing right in the end—a world where Warren couldn’t stop the storm, couldn’t save himself or anyone else.

A world where Warren had been useless and stuck in a cycle that no one could break.

A world where Warren had failed.

 _But this is the aftermath_ , Warren’s brain sparks even as the horror of the situation breeds dread and births panic in his gut. _This is after the cycle, after the storm. This is after we had all—_

Had every loop just been a new timeline? Did every failure create a new line for Warren to try again—a new attempt for Warren to make everything right?

Did the old loops, the ones Warren _remembers_ dying in, all continue on when Warren hadn’t succeeded?

Did multiple universes _really_ exist?

_How many people had Warren failed in the end before he had gotten it all right?_

Warren’s head _screams_ , and he clutches it tight, fingers catching and pulling on hair covered in dust and peppered with small bits of debris as he curls deeper into himself, sneakers squeaking against the plywood and crumbling the wreckage further into dust.

 _No_ , Warren thinks. _No. No._

No, no, no, _no_. _No._

This was not right. This was not his end. This was not where he belonged.

No.

Warren was alive. Warren had fixed everything. Warren had saved who he could and rescued Nathan from himself and convicted Jefferson to the life he deserved and protected the bay from the destruction it had been destined to receive, just like Rachel had wanted. Just like he had been destined to do in the end.

_No._

This was not right. This was _not right_.

Warren was alive. Warren couldn’t breathe. Warren was _alive_.

**_NO._ **

A hand grabs Warren’s shoulder, and before he has a chance to realize what’s happening on he’s wrenched to his feet by fists curled into the fabric of his jacket and forced to face the woman from the photo, with the diner nothing but a backdrop of rubble and ruin behind her.

For a heartbeat and a half, he doesn’t blink.

But then he does, almost before he can stop himself from doing so in his numb astonishment, and she’s gone as if she’d never been there in the first place.

“Hey, kid! I’m talkin’ to you. You hear me?”

It’s a blond man, one Warren thinks he’s seen a few times before but doesn’t know the name of, with tattoos crawling up his neck and an expression that could shatter glass.

He immediately reminds Warren of Nathan, and in Warren’s burned-out state, that’s really the only thing he can compute at all. He doesn’t answer the man, and the man gives him a small shake, fingers digging further into Warren’s clothing for leverage.

“ _Hey_ ,” the guy pushes again, but his voice is less bark this time, and Warren thinks that might have something to do with the fact he’s looking Warren in the face now. “Look at me. You alright? Can you speak? What’s your name, kid?”

“Warren,” Warren hears himself reply without much effort on his part. The man’s expression relaxes, and he looks far less like Nathan now that he’s not squinting at Warren like he’s trying to see though his skull. That knocks some sense back into him, and he shakes his head slightly, pulling away automatically. “I—shit, what? Who are you? What happened?”

The man lets Warren go the moment he tries to move away, but his hands hover by Warren’s arms like he was ready to catch Warren if he decided to dive back down to the ground again. He gives Warren a wary look, angling his face away. Behind him, his dog offers a quiet yelp of a bark, but doesn’t otherwise move.

“You were on the ground, holding your head,” the man explains slowly, and Warren frowns at the obvious test of his mental state. He wasn’t _crazy_ , dammit, just confused. There was a difference. He could understand what was being said to him. “Thought you were having some sort of conniption down there.”

Great, so Warren had been putting on some sort of little show during his vision … problem … thing. Fantastic. _That_ was really what he needed. Was it too late to play it off?

“I’m—I’m fine. I don’t—sorry. I don’t know what happened.” Warren laughs nervously, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “Rough day. High school, amiright?”

The man’s eyes narrow back to a Nathan-grade level again, and he gives Warren a look that he knows all too well as the “I think you’re going a little batshit there, buddy” look he was pretty prone to receiving from a variety of sources lately.

“If you say so,” the man says, sounding like he doesn’t think Warren is okay, but he’s already backing off with his dog obediently matching him step-for-step in the retreat, and Warren’s insides relax. “Ease up on the drugs, okay?”

“I don’t do—” Warren starts, but the man’s already gone, and Warren’s facing the side of the diner, whole and untouched by a vortex of decimation, that he’d seen just before the vision had overcome him.

 

* * *

 

Warren walks the whole way back to Blackwell, his car left in the parking lot to be picked up another day, because he’s too shaken to trust himself behind the wheel despite the short distance it was to get back at all. He didn’t want to risk it, and he couldn’t take his mind off of what had happened anyway, not enough to focus on anything more than putting one foot in front of the other. So he walks.

He’s so distracted by the vision that he doesn’t even think to take his phone out and warn someone of his state, nor does he think about the fact he doesn’t run into anyone he knows as he crosses the length of the campus to the dorms. If he had, he might have been more suspicious of the fact.

If he had, he would probably have known to expect what was waiting for him when he unlocked his door and threw it open, only to nearly shit himself in astonishment at what’s waiting for him the moment his foot crosses the threshold.

“SURPRISE!”

People burst into existence, filling the empty spaces of his room, holding balloons and throwing confetti and cracking loud devices with their hands. Max, Chloe, Brooke, Kate and Trevor and Dana and Stella and—

Warren’s pretty sure his life flashes before his eyes, and his breath gulps down into a bubble that threatens to bust out of his chest, Alien-style, gore and blood included. He stumbles back out his doorway with one hand tight in the fabric of his shirt and the other scrabbling for a hold on the doorframe, feeling like he’d just gotten punched in the gut.

The reaction lasts the smallest split of a second, only long enough for Warren to take that short stumble, but it’s enough. By the time he’s pulling himself back together and expressing the right reaction to being surprised for his birthday, Max is already on him, her hands on his shoulder and his face, asking if he was alright. Chloe is just behind her, her arm angled over Max to clutch at Warren’s other shoulder. Alyssa and Kate are on either side of them, their lips moving, and their brows creased with concern Warren appreciates but _really_ doesn’t want right now.

He doesn’t know what to do.

It’s impossible to think.

“Get away, holy fuck,” a voice calls over the rush of questions all asking the same thing in different voices, and Nathan’s hand manifests between the bodies to pull Warren through them and away from the claustrophobia of chaotic worry that his friends had created around him. “You’re suffocating the fucking life out of him after scaring the shit straight out of his ass. Let the guy breathe.”

The questions quiet, and a dozen sets of eyes all watch Warren and Nathan with varying degrees of wariness. It takes a moment for Warren to realize they’re waiting for him to say something.

“Sorry,” he says hurriedly, lifting his hands up as if to ward them off. He drops them as soon as he realizes the gesture, settling for holding them in front of himself awkwardly. “You startled the hell out of me. I wasn’t expecting this. No one said anything about coming to my room today. I had no idea.”

“Uh, yeah,” Chloe offers after a beat where no one offered anything at all, “that’s because it was a surprise party. Come on, Brainiac, you know how surprise parties work.”

“I did tell you I’d be by later in the day,” Max offers before Warren can say anything, and he does have to admit she had.

“You got me there,” Warren throws back good-naturedly, if a little unsteadily, and that seems to break all the tension in the room. Shoulders relax and smiles return, and before Warren knows it everyone’s standing or sitting around his room and mingling, broken up into small groups that each have something to talk about beyond what they were in Warren’s room for, and Warren only just notices that someone had set up drinks and snacks around, with a cake seated on his desk untouched. Only Nathan, Chloe, and Max stay by Warren’s side where he’d been pulled away to his desk area by Nathan, and only they keep their relatively worried expressions in place.

“You sure you’re okay?” Max asks once it’s clear everyone’s distracted by something or another.

“No,” Warren admits, fingers twisting in a length of ribbon from one of the balloons tied to his desk chair. He stops when Max places her hand on his arm, but he doesn’t let the string drop from his grip. “I’ll be fine in, like, five minutes. My heart needs a good second to calm its shit, but we’re not going into cardiac arrest here. Not on my watch.”

Max gives him a smile, but Chloe and Nathan continue to look uneased by Warren’s reaction to the surprise. Warren almost makes a comment on how similar they could be at times, but stops himself with the knowledge that it definitely wouldn’t be taken well by either of them. He’d save that for another time.

Eventually, Chloe sighs and gives Warren a nudge with her elbow, telling him something about cake before melting into the small crowd of people behind her, but Max doesn’t move to follow her, and Nathan doesn’t budge an inch either. His gaze on Warren is knowing, and Warren knew he’d have to explain the incident outside of the diner to Nathan once everyone had left, because he was a crap liar in the first place and Nathan had a knack for knowing when Warren was pulling things out of his ass in the first place anyway.

“Do you want to see the gift I got you?” Max asks, ripping Warren’s attention away from Nathan. He blinks at her, then grins.

“Hell yeah I do!”

She digs into the bag that never seems to leave her side and procures a square-like object obscured only by an envelope and a flap of newspaper, which she deposits into Warren’s outstretched hands without flourish.

“Skipped on the wrapping paper,” she explains as Warren peers at the present. “Ecological world-saving and all that.”

“Power to the Millennial generation,” Warren agrees, then gives a small gasping scream. Behind him, he hears Nathan groan faintly. “ _Doctor Who 50 thAnniversary boxset?!_” he whisper-screams at her, his eyes wide enough to feel like he was trying to forcibly eject his eyeballs in his excitement. Warren clutches it to his chest and tries his best not to start hyperventilating. He’s not quite sure he manages. “How did you get this? This was released _last month_! It sold out in minutes!” Warren had been so lost in his time loop that he’d never had a chance to stay up half the night to get his hands on it, despite doing so the very first loop he had lived in (if you could call the first one a loop at all). “ _How_ did you—”

Warren stops himself from repeating the question, if only because of Max’s pleased smile and pointing finger. Warren doesn’t have to follow it to know she’s pointing at Nathan, and, with one hand tightly clutching his prize, Warren pivots on his heel and throws his free arm around Nathan, who nearly clocks him with his forehead in defensive reaction to the sudden movement. Warren has known Nathan’s reactions long enough to know it’s coming and easily avoids it, but he can’t stop the complaining that immediately starts up from the squirming guy in his grip.

“Okay, okay! God, Gayram,” Nathan protests when Warren doesn’t relent. His arms are up in the air, and his body’s angled away from Warren, but Warren’s got enough height and grip to keep it from mattering. “Could you make this anymore homo? Let me go, I get it. You love the stupid boxset, go smear yourself all over Caulfield now. It was her idea anyway.”

“You helped in more than just money matters, Nathan,” Max counters as Warren turns and gives her the same hug he’d given Nathan, and she laughs and hugs him back without hesitation.

“Thank you,” Warren tells them earnestly when he releases Max, Chloe ambling up with plates and plastic utensils with the mission of attacking the cake, a line of people already starting up behind her as she pushes her way in. She gives him a smile that’s all teeth and happiness as she passes him, and Warren can’t help but return it in full. He turns to face his room of friends and laughs. “You guys are awesome!”

“We know,” says Dana sweetly, first in line for the cake Chloe is already doling out from over Warren’s shoulder. She accepts it and in the same motion lifts up onto her toes to press a kiss to Warren’s cheek. “But so are you. Happy Birthday, Warren.”

 _This was worth it_ , Warren thinks as he watches everyone clamor around for cake, the semblance of order the line had offered all but lost the moment the cake was actually being handed out.

It was one of the few moments he had where he could be sure he’d done the right thing in the end, and he knew, with it, that he’d do it all over again if he had to. For this.

For them _._

 

* * *

 

“Did you find the woman?” Nathan asks him hours later from where he’s sprawled out on Warren’s bed and messing with his camera, Warren at his desk and already scribbling down details he wants to remember later for the campaign he was going to make for Trevor. He wanted something that would be more than your standard D&D go, maybe something that could hook whoever else Trevor was bringing along with him.

Well. If that was even possible. Warren still didn’t know who Trevor was planning on bringing with him, but Warren knew all of the hardcore nerds at Blackwell, and he was pretty sure they didn’t associate with skater meatheads like Trevor’s posse.

(Then again, by those assumptions, Warren shouldn’t either. So maybe that wasn’t the right way to think about it.)

“Hey,” Nathan calls, and Warren feels something bounce off the back of his head. “I’m talking to you. Get your nerdy little head out of that nerdy little ass and answer me.”

Warren rolls his eyes and swivels in his seat until he faces Nathan, arms crossed over his chest in exasperation. Nathan doesn’t even bother sitting up, just raises a single eyebrow from where his head is propped up by a pillow and one of his arms.

“No,” Warren says, leaning back in his chair and sighing. “It’s like she doesn’t exist or something. I didn’t even meet anyone I don’t already know, except,” Warren pauses, frowning to himself just for a beat. “There was this blond guy. He’s around a lot, and I’ve definitely seen him before, but.”

“Blond guy?” Nathan repeats quietly, almost to himself.

“Yeah. Tattoos and a dog, I think he’s the guy that lives in that trailer that’s sometimes by the diner?” At least, Warren was pretty sure. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the guy around in any timeline, he’d just never actually interacted with him before. Not that he remembered, anyway. “Grumpy guy, thought I was on drugs.”

Warren winces as soon as the last word leaves his lips, because technically the guy had a good reason to even think that in the first place. But Nathan doesn’t catch the movement; he’s halfway sitting up and looking at Warren full on, his eyes narrowed in a sharp glare.

“Stay away from Frank,” Nathan tells him coldly, face darkening, and Warren immediately thinks to himself, _Oh, so_ that’s  _who Frank is._

Warren holds his hands up. “Hey, he came to me. I had another episode and he was picking me up off of the ground and making sure I was alright. Which? Not exactly a douchebag thing to do!”

Nathan’s glare hardens. “Frank is bad mojo, Gayram. I don’t care what shit he did for you.” Warren opens his mouth to retaliate, but Nathan cuts him off, “Episode? Like the whales? What happened?”

And just like that, all the saliva in Warren’s mouth turns to ash once again, and his throat constricts with the severity of his want to take back any mention of any vision at all. His day had gone so well following the incident, and he just didn’t want to talk about that right now. Especially considering what it was he saw.

The vision was not one he wanted to share, but by the way Nathan is looking at him—like he could see right through Warren to the truth of it all if he really wanted to—Warren knows he can’t just brush it all away.

That wouldn’t be fair to Nathan, and he’s had more than enough injustice in his lifetime as it was. Warren didn’t want to add to that, even if it was with something Nathan was better off not knowing about.

“I saw—The whales were there again,” Warren starts slowly, almost at a mumble, with his eyes on his hands and his hands tying knots out of his fingers in his lap, and then he shakes his head, “no, sorry—whale. One whale. I don’t know where the others went. It—Fuck, okay, so. There was a lot of debris—”

“Debris?” Nathan repeats immediately, and a glance up tells Warren Nathan’s now seated fully upright on Warren’s bed and leaning forward, his expression a dark mixture of things Warren had no names for.

“Rubble,” Warren clarifies quietly. “Buildings, roofs, signs. Things like that. All around me, it was just. There was so much de—destruction.”

 _Death_ , Warren had almost said. The word stuck to the back of his throat, unused and bitter in its truth. _All around me, it had been nothing but death._

“You saw what happened after the cyclone hit?” Nathan guesses easily after a moment of silence between them. Warren’s hands seize together, crushing his fingers blue, and his eyes wince shut despite himself.

It wasn’t real.

It can’t have been.

“I don’t know how,” Warren replies. “That isn’t what happened. It never even came. I don’t know why I keep seeing things that never happened to us.”

Warren knows it could be his mind playing tricks on him. He knows hallucinations could be part of the mental scars his journey had left him with, along with the anxiety and the fear and all the other things that had cumulated into whatever he now had the rest of his life to deal with. He knows that’s all it could be—all it should be. All it _is_.

But that didn’t make it any easier to bear, and it didn’t make them feel like anything less than an omen when they came.

“Paper,” Nathan says suddenly, pulling himself from the bed in a motion Warren misses completely.

“What?” Warren belatedly asks, watching as Nathan rifles through one of Warren’s desk draws and pulls out a pair of scissors and construction paper left over from his project from before. “What are you doing?”

Nathan doesn’t answer Warren. He knees the drawer shut with a fairly loud bang and returns to his seat on the bed with his prizes, immediately spreading the paper out and picking one seemingly at random to start attacking with the scissors.

Warren only watches him in bewilderment. It’s not the first time Nathan’s done something out of Warren’s understanding (hell, most of the things Nathan did was outside of Warren’s ability to comprehend, this was nothing new), so Warren just lets him do it, figuring in the end he’d find out what he wanted to know anyway.

And silence falls between them as it goes, the only noise coming from the hum of Warren’s computer and the rhythmic, almost soothing sound of Nathan cutting up his paper. It’s a silence Warren can handle, and he does for a short while, but it’s not one he wants to perpetuate—not with everything churning inside his mind. So, despite his earlier want of keeping Nathan away of all the atrocities that Warren’s brain had manifested for him thus far, Warren’s need for closure wins out, and he finds himself opening his mouth once again.

“Do you really think we’re done?” Warren asks quietly, his low tone cutting through the sawing noise like thunder through rain. Nathan doesn’t react immediately, and from the way he continues slicing the scissors through the paper in his hand without any indication he was aware Warren had spoken, Warren starts to think maybe Nathan hadn’t heard him.

But then the cutting stops, and Nathan’s head lifts up in one fluid motion to lock his blue eyes onto Warren’s.

“I said last time I just thought it was all in your head, but after all the shit that’s happened to you,” Nathan starts, and his tone is as if they’re talking about something far more insignificant than time repeating itself again, “I know saying ‘yes’ could easily be the wrong answer, and probably will be with the way life likes to fuck both of us raw. But I don’t want to think we’re not.” He hesitates, drops his eyes back to the paper again, and Warren sees his lips twist into a scowl. “The fuck else could it throw at us? What else could matter more than our lives?”

“I ask myself that all the time,” Warren responds, causing Nathan to lift his head up again. “I keep asking, what else could there be? What could I have missed? Why would I have gotten this far if I still had been doing things wrong?” Warren’s voice starts to warble, so he swallows and stops before he has the chance to be pathetic, willing Nathan to fill the space.

But Nathan only stares at him, for such a long time that Warren ends up shaking his head in confusion and asking him, “What? Is it that weird of me to ask the same questions you do?”

“You blame yourself for everything that happened,” Nathan says, and it’s not a question, so Warren technically doesn’t have a chance to refute it even if he thought he could in the first place. “You think everything that went wrong was your fault.”

His tone is so matter-of-fact that Warren almost feels insulted at being called out like this.

“Of _course_ it was!” Warren spits, startling himself with his sudden intensity. Nathan blinks at him, equally caught off guard by the outburst, but the fire has started and Warren’s already burning, as if some switch had been flipped in that moment and couldn’t be undone. “ _I_ was the one who had to fix everything to make time move again! No one else was going through all of this over and over and over again like I had!” Warren’s voice scrapes through his throat, higher than his usual tone of speaking, threaded with the pain and the worry and the aftermath of everything he had lived through without anyone by his side until the very end. “Everything that happened was _my fault_ , Nathan! Mine! And I _keep seeing_ what I left behind when I thought I fixed this! Me! Not you, not Max or Chloe or anyone else in on this badly-written episode of existence, me! This. Is. All. On. _Me_.”

Warren’s heart hurts. He feels it pounding against the walls of his ribcage, aching and drumming and begging to be clutched and wrenched free, lest it burst with everything it was filled with and drown him in it.

He feels like crying. He feels like screaming. He feels like the weight of his world is still on his shoulders and it’s all he can do not to be crushed flat, despite the fact he was sitting in his room unscathed, with someone who had been killed in so many other loops he had faced and was proof that s _omething_ had gone right in the end. If only at first.

Warren doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Warren doesn’t know what’s wrong with anything happening to him, and _only_ to him, and he doesn’t know what the universe is trying so hard to tell him. All he knows is something feels _wrong_ , and he has no way of knowing how to make it _right_ again.

“I don’t know what I’m _doing wrong_ ,” he grinds out quietly from between his teeth, and realizes as Nathan’s hand curls around his shoulder and pulls sharply that he had closed his eyes at some point and started holding his head. Warren hits the ground with a muffled thud, his knees having given out before he’d known he needed them to keep him up.

“Snap out of it,” Nathan whispers to him sharply, surprisingly without malice, standing next to where Warren’s toppled onto the floor from the force of Nathan’s yank. “Ground back down to Earth, Major Shitass. Get yourself together.”

The sudden action had jarred Warren, and now all he was doing was crouching on the floor of his own bedroom, gasping and blinking as if coming out of a trance. But he had stopped feeling like he was being smothered in all of everything around him and inside of him, so he couldn’t say he was upset with Nathan for pulling him out of his chair. He musters up a glare to throw at Nathan all the same. Nathan only stares back.

“You didn’t cause any of this,” Nathan continues once he’s seemingly stared at Warren long enough to know he wasn’t going to fall back into hysterics again (at least, not yet). “You helped us all figure out how to make it right in the end, yeah, but you didn’t start all the crap-a-liscious slurry fuckshit cycle you had to go through in order to get here, okay? There’s no fucking way you caused it. You weren’t even—” Nathan stops suddenly, teeth snapping together, as if he were physically cutting a word he’d been about to say in half to stop it from coming out. “… You weren’t the one who killed Rachel. You weren’t the one who helped Jefferson infiltrate into the system. You weren’t the one calling him and giving him money and building a bunk in the rock fucking bottom of a shit ass farmfuckinghouse—”

Nathan cuts himself off once again, but this time it’s because Warren’s reached up and clasped his own hand onto Nathan’s elbow in turn, fingers digging into the shield of fabric he always wore around it. He hadn’t yanked, but the touch had been enough to ground Nathan to a halt, and Warren watches him with wide eyes. Nathan swallows, then shakes his head fiercely, a long stream of soft curses hissing from his lips too low for Warren to catch more than a few of them, and then he sinks to the floor, too.

If Warren’s heart had hurt before, it was nothing compared to how it felt now.

Nathan blamed himself for what had happened, Warren realizes with a jolt that sickens him. Nathan thought he had been the trigger to everything, the catalyst that had started it all, because he had the most connections to all that had happened.

Nathan thought he’d started it. Nathan blamed himself for all of it.

And Warren had never realized.

 _God_ , Warren thinks, watching Nathan’s eyes turn up to the ceiling briefly before narrowing again and settling back on Warren’s hand, still holding Nathan’s elbow firmly even as it nearly twitches out of his grip in that way that was so distinctly Nathan, _of course he does, how the fuck did I not think of that? I know him better than this. I’ve heard of how he was raised, for fuck’s sake. I should have known._

Nathan may not have always been the one to own up to things he had deliberately done when it was to others, but when it was to himself? Nathan took the blame for things even when his part had been nearly insignificant, and no one, barring Victoria probably, knew it, did they? Warren hadn’t, even if he should have by now. But how could they, with the way he reacted to the idea he wrought upon himself? Everyone always thought he was just acting out, usually without questioning the reasons behind what he did.

But it wasn’t just that, was it?

Nathan was always one of two sides: a cacophony of violent hues all swirling and twisting together, or void of any color at all. When it came to Nathan, there was no other.

When it came to Nathan, there was no in-between.

When it came to Nathan, it was all or nothing, and Warren refuses to believe he had become this way all on his own.

“What happened to you, Nathan?”

Warren’s words ring through the silence between them and, despite the soft whisper they had been spoken in, Warren can feel the way they slice through the air, the way they burned his tongue as they left his mouth. He had intended them more of a reject-able inquiry than the loaded question he knew they were—a question he never would have asked so simply if only he had had better control of himself in that moment—but he can see from the way Nathan’s expression suddenly becomes engulfed in a darkness that scares Warren to his very core that the question was filled with so much more than Warren could even begin to imagine.

He wishes, desperately, that he could take it all back right in that moment. Not just the question, not just the current situation— _everything_. All the jabs and the mean words and the lack of patience he had ever had for or used on Nathan in the few months he had become so close to him, because there was so much to him that Warren truly didn’t understand or know. So much darkness and pain and regret that he had only witnessed and heard once and twice before, respectively, easily forgotten in the relief that followed the loss of the destruction that had been foretold to come.

Warren wants to take all of it back. But he knows he can’t. No matter how much he might want to, this loop was the end. Warren couldn’t take any of it back.

The muscles in Nathan’s jaw jump as he clenches his teeth together, but his eyes weren’t on Warren, and Warren knew the shadowed look he cast onto the short stretch of carpet between them wasn’t intended for Warren himself, rather it was nothing more than a reaction to the demons Warren’s question had stirred up. Slowly, Warren pushes himself back up into a seated position, buying himself and Nathan time to let it pass, but even after a few minutes nothing about the situation changes, and Warren’s throat constricts around the swallow he tries to make.

“I’m sorry.” It’s quiet, Warren’s apology. Quiet enough for Nathan to ignore completely.

But Nathan—twitchy, bitter, always-in-motion Nathan—turns slowly to face him, and then stops moving completely. He stares silently, eyes clear and round and unmasked in a way Warren had never before witnessed, and in that instant Warren feels everything.

Pain, fear, regret, betrayal—all the things Warren had heard and seen from Nathan in times this Nathan didn’t even really know about, Warren feels them all. Like a surge through his chest, Warren feels them, so much that Warren nearly bends at the waist and heaves with the way they engulf him suddenly and entirely, but in the end, he doesn’t move at all.

Once upon a time he might have. Once upon a time he might have done more than let loose a few hot tears that didn’t make it farther than his nose before being scrubbed away by his sleeve, might have taken Nathan’s brief but honest openness as a reason to push and dig for more, to find out all the things he still didn’t know about the person he was becoming embarrassingly attached to, but he wasn’t that Warren anymore. And he couldn’t be that Warren again.

They say nothing for a long time. Or, at least, what feels like a long time, with Warren chewing his lips to a chapped fate and Nathan starting back up a bounce in his leg that Warren eventually has to reach out and stop.

“This is fucked,” Nathan finally says, just after Warren’s stopped his leg. “This is so fucked. I don’t want to sit on my ass over this shit.” He scrubs his hand through his hair and stands up, pulling on his shirt-and-sweater ensemble without doing much to undo the wrinkles that had formed in it, then looks down at Warren expectantly. Warren only frowns at him.

“What?”

“Ice cream?” says Nathan, like he’d _just_ said that, and Warren had been an asshole for not listening to him the first time.

“We just had cake,” Warren points out. Nathan gives him a look.

“Get off your pussy ass Graham, we’re getting ice cream.” And then, before Warren has a chance to get up himself, he’s being hauled to his feet by a pair of comfortingly rough hands attached to one Nathan Prescott. “Fuck, you’re heavy.”

“It’s the damn diet of constant sugar you have me on,” Warren grumbles back, trying to smooth out his own clothes. Nathan doesn’t reply to the obvious jab, and Warren looks up curiously. “… What?”

“Whateverthefuck happens to us, we’ll make it out,” Nathan tells Warren, and, because of the way he says it so nonchalantly, it takes Warren a beat to realize what it is Nathan’s even saying to him.

But then Warren’s lips quirk, and he smiles. “Yeah,” he says, quietly at first, then, more resolutely, “yeah!”

Nathan nods once, firmly, then grabs Warren’s elbow and drags him out the door, and not another word of the past is mentioned between them again that night.

And, frankly, Warren was more than okay with that.


	7. The Catalyst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was struggling between just saying "fuck it" to my initial plan of waiting until chapter 8 was more coherent and less "are you one massive chapter or two chapters and where the heck do you even split sir also ending who what is this mess" and waiting until next week when I had the chance to try and figure more of chapter 8 out, when suddenly, at one in the morning on this very Friday, I had an epiphany for the last sentence of chapter 8 (slash 9?), which means 7 was good for launch.
> 
> Except I don't feel like waiting until next Thursday when this is material that's been seen before, sooooo. 
> 
> here u go pls enjoy k thx luv u bye

When Warren gets a frantic text from Max to meet her at the outlook near Chloe’s house, he doesn’t think twice about following it. He doesn’t think to ask her what’s going on, doesn’t think to ask if he should bring someone of authority along in case some serious shit was going down. Doesn’t think to do much more than send her a text in response asking her if she’s okay, to which she only pleads for him to hurry. It scares him to the core, causing him to frantically evacuate his dorm room and scramble to his car, and he tentatively breaks the speed limit a couple of times during the short ride to Chloe’s place.

He really wishes he had thought to ask what the hell was going on, however, because before he can even reach the road that Chloe’s house sits on, he’s stopped by a police officer standing in the middle of the street and told to detour. Instead of meekly following orders like he might have in another lifetime, he turns down the road he’s pointed to and pulls to the side a few feet in, throwing himself out of the car just in time to see Max hustling up to him with a panicked look on her face. Behind her, a group of people mingle with a handful of cops on the opposite side of the street he was just on, and all three of the police cars that block the way have their lights going. Warren shifts forward on his feet, eyes allured onto the scene in an attempt to glean more information, but he has no idea what’s going on.

“What the _hell_?” Warren asks the scene more than he asks Max, who’s reached him and immediately gabbed onto him. He glances down at her for a bare second before looking back to the sight, trying to figure out who the people the cops were talking to were.

“Warren,” Max calls urgently, her hand tightly clasped around his elbow, and Warren tears his confused gaze away from the cluster of people and flashing lights. “They found her,” Max tells him before he has the chance to say anything, and he looks back to the congregation sharply. Found her? Found _who_? When he looks at Max again, his confusion is still clear on his face, and Max looks pale as a ghost. “They found Rachel’s body,” she clarifies for him slowly, so quiet that Warren is given the opportunity to think he didn’t hear her right. But he knows he did.

Cold, dizzying grief hits him in the chest, and Warren’s arms break out in goosebumps beneath the sleeves of his shirt. His reaction startles him, because he’d never known Rachel. He’d never met her, never known anything but her name and what she looked like from her missing person’s poster. But she’d played a massive part in the near half-year of his life that he’d lost, and something in him aches for her.

“What?” he chokes once he’s able to pull away from his astonishment. “Where?”

“The junkyard.” Max turns and scrutinizes the cluster of people. There’s no doubt they have something to do with the recovery of Rachel’s body, but they weren’t all cops. Warren doesn’t know what they’re doing. Max looks at him again, and Warren notices her bottom lip is chapped, like she’d been busy worrying it. “Chloe already knows.”

Warren’s eyebrows shoot up. If Chloe already knew, then it was likely she wasn’t taking it well. And if she was taking it like she did the first time Rachel had been declared dead over her previous state of missing despite there being a lack of a body, then the fact Max was here with him and not with Chloe made exactly zero sense to him. Something was going on here.

“Where is she?” Warren asks.

“I don’t know, she’s not answering her phone. I don’t know where she could have gone.” Max’s grip, still on Warren’s elbow, tightens. Understanding starts to grow in Warren’s consciousness. “I don’t know what else to do. I need— Warren, please, I need your car. I need to look for her.”

Max looks so distraught that Warren feels guilty she even thinks that he’d be capable of telling her no in the first place. How could he ever?

“Here,” he says without hesitating, fishing his car keys out of his jacket pocket and holding them out for her. “Go. I’ll take the bus back to Blackwell. Keep me updated, okay?”

“God, thank you, Warren.” Max’s arms are tight around him in a hug he leans into, savoring it despite knowing he didn’t feel the same way about her as he used to, and then she lets him go in a rush. Warren watches grimly her as she jogs away from him and throws herself into his old car. The engine revs to life, and she’s gone.

Then, just as his eyes stray back to the curve of the beach he’d become so familiar with in recent months, it all hits him at once, and he stops breathing.

Because _Rachel’s body_ _has been_ _found_. The news of its discovery has had a chance to go around—long enough for Chloe to go missing and for Max to fail at immediately finding her. Likely because of her connection with Madsen, but … it didn’t seem probable to Warren that Madsen had outright told her. He was a jerk, sure, but he couldn’t have been that cruel, not when it was obvious he meant well for the people he cared about. Chloe included.

Which means Chloe may have found out another way. Through a connection, maybe.

No one had more connections than Nathan, and, with such a strong correlation to the case surrounding Rachel’s disappearance, no one was more likely to be given the inside information faster than Nathan.

And, Warren now realizes, he hasn’t heard from Nathan all day.

Shit.

_Shit._

Warren rips his phone out of his back pocket and dials Nathan’s number, but it does nothing but ring and go to voicemail. He tries a text next, but knows with building anxiety that Nathan wasn’t going to answer that, either.

He has to get back to the dorms. Now. Nathan might not be there—but he had to try.

Warren checks the time, but his mental schedule tells him the bus isn’t expected around for another nineteen minutes, and he can’t wait that long. He’s better off traveling back to Blackwell on foot, regardless of the distance. He could nab the bus on its way there if it passed him, but he had to go right now.

He needs get back to Blackwell. He needs to make sure Nathan hasn’t—

Warren turns on his heel and takes off at a run. He’d deal with the consequences of his unnatural exercise later, because running was the only option his panic allowed him. He couldn’t have walked if he tried.

 

* * *

 

Warren’s in stitches when he finally reaches the campus, but he pushes on, clutching his sides like it would do anything for the stabbing pains in them. His legs feel like lead and his head feels like it’s full of buzzing bees, but he couldn’t take a breather. Not now. Not yet.

When he reaches Nathan’s door, though, he stumbles over his attempt to knock and his knuckles thump quietly, uselessly, against the wood, shattering the illusion his urgency. He tries again, twice when no one answers, but still to no avail. Either Nathan isn’t in there, or he’s just not answering the door.

“Nathan?” Warren calls, because something’s telling him not to walk away just yet. “Nathan!”

There’s a long beat of silence, mostly consisting of Warren trying to slow his breathing with his forehead pressed against the door, and then the door knob starts turning. Warren jumps away.

Victoria’s at the door when it opens, and she scrapes her eyes over Warren silently. She looks tired; her eyes are red around the edges and purple just underneath, and the usually-perfectly-pressed points of her collar are crumpled and stained on one edge. She doesn’t say anything to him, and Warren only looks back at her with his lips pressed in a line, his eyes wordlessly begging her to let him in. For a moment, she’s nothing but a dragon guarding the gates of treasure. But then she relents.

She sighs and steps aside, back into the room, and Warren stumbles in over his feet as he hurriedly tries to enter before she can change her mind.

What Warren finds inside doesn’t surprise him, yet still shocks him into stopping two steps over the threshold.

Nathan’s room is a wreck.

There are papers strewn everywhere, torn and crunched and mutilated until they were nothing but confetti. There are movies on the floor from where they’d spilled off their shelf, piled like a nest around a black phone Warren almost doesn’t notice in the dark of the room. One of the movies lies open in its casing, telling Warren that something likely hit it hard before it fell. Beer bottles sit neatly in a cluster at the foot of Nathan’s bed, and shards of glass the same color make a pile next to them. Files spilling of photos coat the floor haphazardly, and Warren belatedly realizes he’s stepping on one. Once he moves his foot, his eyes are back to the scene before him.

Pictures, the creepy ones Warren always found himself staring at when he was zoning out while waiting for Nathan to put his bong away, are missing from the walls, and Warren spots a hint of florescent orange just beneath the couch before his eyes center on the figure occupying it.

Nathan’s the figure on the couch, lying on his back with his arm across his eyes. His knuckles are red and pink, obvious even in the darkness of the room, but that seems to be the extend of bodily harm that Warren can see. Nathan doesn’t respond to Warren’s presence, and Warren wonders if he might be asleep before deciding that was a stupid question. Of course he wasn’t; Nathan was to sleep as Warren was to parties: they rarely mixed willingly, and Victoria wasn’t the type to drug him into a stupor. Not at a time like this.

Unsure of what it was he was even doing now that he’d gained entry and confirmed Nathan hadn’t done any irreversible damage—at least, not to himself—Warren looks at Victoria helplessly, but she only stands there with her arms crossed and her cold, hard eyes watching Warren unwaveringly. She’d never warmed to Warren like Max had done to Nathan. It was why Warren was never at things involving Nathan’s circle, despite Nathan sometimes being at the ones that involved Warren’s circle. Nathan’s friends, apart from Hayden, had never accepted Warren’s presence as a constant in Nathan’s life.

That fact had never bothered him until this very moment.

“What happened?” Warren asks when Victoria remains stonily silent, and is subsequently horrified when his voice is no stronger than a rasp that breaks over the second word. Instead of answering, Victoria’s slim blonde eyebrow raises, and Warren feels his face heat up under the scrutiny.

“I did,” a voice answers, catching Warren by surprise. Nathan’s got his head turned toward him when Warren looks over, and he looks like he’d taken a hiking trip through Hell. Warren doesn’t think he’s ever seen Nathan so pale, so ragged, not even before the loops had started and Nathan had been at his very worst.

Nathan pulls himself up into a sitting position, scrubbing his hands over the hollows of his cheeks, then up to his eyes. Beside Warren, Victoria takes a step towards Nathan, but then stops, her arms crossed tight across her chest like she was physically holding herself back. When Nathan looks up again, his eyes are on Warren first, but they flick to Victoria after a moment.

“You can go, Vic,” Nathan tells her.

“Nathan,” she starts immediately, but is cut off when Nathan shakes his head.

“Just go, Victoria.”

Victoria’s hands ball into fists, and Warren doesn’t miss the hurt expression she flashes beneath her hard exterior. Nathan seems to notice it, too, because he continues in a softer voice, “I’ll text you. You don’t need to be here. You need to sleep and do your girly pampering crap. You look like shit.”

It still sounds harsh to Warren’s ears, but there must be something to it that registers with Victoria, because Victoria’s shoulders slump after a beat, and then her eyes roll and she scoffs quietly. “Wonder whose fault that is,” she mutters. She looks at Warren tiredly. “His phone’s on his bed, turned off. I’m speed dial four. _Don’t_ forget it.”

The silent threat is obvious:  if you don’t contact me the second something happens, you’re a dead man walking.

Warren fights a wince and nods at her. She didn’t trust him with Nathan, but Warren doesn’t think she trusts anyone with Nathan but herself. Warren doesn’t take it personally.

The door shuts quietly behind her when she leaves, and then it’s just Warren and Nathan in the silent dark. Warren looks to Nathan to find him already looking back in silence, lips pressed together in a way that nothing other than pure tension could conjure up.

Warren breaks the silence first. “Max told me. I would have come by earlier if I had known.”

Nathan tilts his head so he faces the ceiling again and doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” Warren continues quietly, and the silence spreads between them once more. Warren shifts on his feet, unwilling to break it again when he had nothing to offer, but aware he couldn’t just consider this encounter done with and depart. He couldn’t leave until he knew Nathan would be all right.

No, that wasn’t right. He couldn’t leave until he knew Nathan _was_ all right. Because, until he was, there was always the span of time that still existed where he wasn’t, and Warren couldn’t leave him to that on his own.

Because Nathan wouldn’t if it were Warren in his position.

Maybe he would have if he was the stranger he’d been so many times before, but this Nathan—the Nathan who allowed Warren into his room even when he wasn’t at his most stable, the Nathan who kept an eye on Warren even when Warren was too distracted to notice in the moment, the Nathan who would defend him and stand with him if Warren really needed it—would. Without a doubt, Warren knows this Nathan— _his_ Nathan—would.

And this Nathan was the only one who mattered anymore. The other Nathans were gone.

Without breaking the quiet, Warren digs his phone out of his pocket, ignores the low battery warning, and shuts the ringer off, then kicks his shoes to the wayside and sits down on the ground before the couch with his back to Nathan. He’s positioned by Nathan’s pelvis in a way that allowed him the ability to both see Nathan’s face in full if he wanted, but also turn away and give Nathan privacy if necessary.

Nathan watches him the entire time, only looking more and more exhausted as Warren moves through his actions, like the hot air Warren’s arrival had given him was slowly seeping out from within him. Warren can hear his fingers fiddling with something, probably from his pocket, from just behind Warren’s head once he’s seated, and for a moment the want to stop him flashes in his mind like a reflex.

Something always had to be moving when it came to Nathan. Maybe it made everything else easier to deal with, the fact he could control something as everything else happened around him, but movement was to Nathan as obscure references were to Warren: it’s just part of their entity, their being. Most of the time, the repetitive motions sparked some sort of anxiety in Warren and he would stop Nathan from jiggling his leg or clicking his pen or doing whatever he was doing absentmindedly as he worked or talked (and he’d move onto another motion, but the change reset the feeling in Warren, so it worked out for a while), but he can’t bring himself to do it this time. So, he forces himself to ignore it.

Nathan sighs, a soft noise that pulls Warren from falling into his thoughts as he was becoming more and more prone to doing, and Warren glances up to meet Nathan’s red-rimmed eyes. Nathan’s gaze searches him tiredly, but it has that look in it that Warren has come to associate with the wars Nathan sometimes had in his own head. Warren knows the best thing to do was to wait it out and let Nathan decide what to say or do about it, or whether to even acknowledge its existence at all. But, apparently, Nathan didn’t want to follow the usual rules this time.

“It makes it real,” Nathan whispers suddenly, surprising Warren. He’d come looking for Nathan on instinct, more to be there to make sure he wasn’t harmed more than to actually talk about anything. Nathan wasn’t a talker—not in this sense. This, what he was doing now, was unexpected. “There wasn’t a body before,” Nathan continues slowly, and Warren’s attention on him is rapt. “There wasn’t anything, only pictures, only Jefferson’s—” Nathan cuts himself off, then goes abruptly silent. Warren puts the pieces together himself, unable to bring himself to push Nathan into explaining more.

There had always been a chance what Jefferson said hadn’t been true. That Rachel had actually gotten away and been in hiding, gone for the time being but always with a chance that she could one day resurface and prove Jefferson’s lie wrong.

But the discovery of her body solidified the fact that she was never coming back, and that Jefferson had been telling the truth the whole time. It solidified the fact that he wasn’t as much of a liar as they wanted him to be. That, sometimes, he told the truth, and the hard part was figuring out which of his words were real when you didn’t want to believe any of them at all.

Jefferson really had killed Rachel, and the metal bars and life sentence he’d received in return weren’t sufficient payment for what he’d taken from them.

Warren’s eyes meet Nathan’s again and he nods once in understanding. Somehow, that small action proves to be too much.

Nathan makes a noise of broken frustration and smothers his wordless voice in the palms of his hands. Something in Warren breaks in turn, and, without thinking of it, his hand lifts and curls behind him to pull the hem of Nathan’s shirt between his fingers. The gesture is so instinctually small—precise and executed in a way that would keep Nathan from automatically pushing him away or startling in his state—that Warren realizes, once the fabric’s securely in his grip, that maybe he was starting to understand the chaotic mystery that was _Nathan Prescott_ after all.

The silence is easier when it falls again, and Warren keeps his gaze on Nathan until he pulls his hands from his face and returns the look Warren didn’t realize he was expressing, the cool color of his irises stark against the hot red of his eyes even in the dim lighting of the room. They don’t say anything to one another, but Nathan crosses his arms loosely over his torso, and the brush of his fingers against Warren’s curled ones is a form of acceptance in Warren’s attempt at comfort that Warren didn’t know he was looking for until it had been given to him.

His heart thumps hard in his chest in response—a specific feeling he hadn’t felt since that day he’d woken up to find the storm surely passed, and he has to blink to himself in a mixture of confusion and surprise for a moment over it. Nathan has both his eyebrows raised in question when Warren manages to look at him again, but Warren only shakes his head quickly. Of course, that does nothing to ease Nathan’s curiosity, but Warren doesn’t really care. He wouldn’t be able to explain whatever the thumping thing was if he tried.

Warren leans his head back against the couch and averts his gaze to the ceiling, and, after a beat, Nathan follows suit. They stay like that for a good while, Warren thinks, because before long his ass starts to go numb from sitting in one position on the hard floor and his neck feels like it’s starting to kink. Finally, when he can’t take it anymore, he lifts his head up and sighs.

“What time is it?” Nathan asks, and Warren looks first to the clock Nathan keeps on the wall, only to realize it isn’t there. When he pulls his phone out to check that way, however, he’s greeted with a half dozen missed calls and more missed texts from Max.

“ _Shit_ ,” Warren hisses softly, opening the text thread for Max. Nathan moves behind him, sitting up, and peers at the phone in Warren’s grip. The texts are all Warren asking him where the hell he is, which is completely unlike Max, even when she’s in a panic.

“Price,” is all Nathan says, his breath ghosting along the back of Warren’s neck, and, for the first time, Warren can hear the hurt in Nathan’s voice when he says her name. Not hurt for himself, but for Chloe.

“I have to call her back. Crap.” Warren scrambles to his feet, already pulling up Max’s number to do so. Nathan looks up at Warren from his position on the couch. “Just—shit, I don’t have—I’ll be right back. My charger isn’t in here and I’m running out of juice. I’ll—I’ll be right—”

“Just _go_ , Graham,” Nathan cuts in. “I’ll be okay for the five damn seconds you’ll be gone.”

Warren looks at him for a beat, his phone clasped tightly in his grip, and then nods and turns to leave the room without bothering with his shoes.

He’s barely thrown the door open and made it over the threshold when Chloe appears out of nowhere and grabs him, pivoting him away and up against his own door with the dull thud of flesh on wood. Warren knows he’d yelped, but it had been in surprise, not pain. Chloe might have just slammed him up against a door, but she’d done so without actually hurting him.

“Chloe—” Warren starts in surprise, and immediately the pressure she’d been using to anchor him against the door goes away. She stills holds him by his arms, her chest heaving as if she’d run to Blackwell, but he could break away if he’d really wanted to.

Almost immediately following the noise of Warren’s collision with the door, Nathan appears in his doorway, hands gripping the doorframe like he’s threatening to tear it off and his stance telling Warren he’d been ready to take down whomever had ambushed Warren before he’d even made it to his own room. He doesn’t relax as soon as he notices it’s Chloe—but he doesn’t push further out the door, nor does he say a word. He waits, like Max does just beyond Chloe’s shoulder, and Warren is left to Chloe’s devices on his own.

Chloe’s face is a mess of color—red eyes and splotchy cheeks from crying, dirt smeared along the corner of her jaw and a bruise purpling just beneath it, strands of blue hair stuck by the adhering effect of her sweat and tears. The sight makes Warren’s heart ache, even as Chloe clutches onto Warren’s shoulders like she’s going to collapse without him to hold her up.

“Tell me Graham,” she rasps, her voice hard as steel beneath the tarnish of her raw throat, “tell me you couldn’t save her, no matter what you did. Tell me she was dead from the start. Tell me you didn’t just _let her die_.”

Warren considers her bloodshot eyes slowly, the blue of her irises so starkly contrasted against the red that Nathan’s eyes momentarily flash in Warren’s mind, a resemblance he’d seen too many times to count, and then he raises his hand to cover one of hers. Her nails dig into his shirt in response, but he doesn’t waver. Not this time. This was the truth, and this he could manage. “There was nothing I could do,” he tells her slowly, and his voice cracks over the third word. “ _Nothing_ , Chloe. I—reset after she’d already been gone. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Chloe’s eyes bore into Warren’s unblinkingly. Then, something manifests in her expression, and she nods once, curtly, and releases Warren. Max rushes forward, grabbing Chloe’s arm, but Chloe shakes her head and turns to leave without another word. Max watches her pass, then spins on her heel and follows. Warren’s left to watch them leave together, and not once do either of them look back. The moment they’re out the door, Warren presses his face into his hands and takes a shaky but deep breath.

“Were you lying?” Nathan’s voice comes from beside him. Warren drops his hands to find Nathan hasn’t moved from his doorway.

“Of course I wasn’t,” Warren replies quietly. He looks at Nathan like he can’t believe he was questioning him, too. “Do you really think I’d have just let Jefferson have her if I could have stopped it?”

Nathan blinks, but he doesn’t even give himself a moment consider the idea. “No,” he says immediately, which relaxes something in Warren and spurs a touch of relief he doesn’t quite understand. “No, I don’t.”

And, with that, Warren realizes for the first time that Nathan trusts him just as much as Warren trusts Nathan in turn. Enough to accept, without hesitation, that Warren would have done anything to save who he could.

It was a lot of trust. Warren thinks he should feel reprieve or happiness at earning something like that from someone like Nathan Prescott, but all he feels is undeserving of it, because, while it was absolutely true, something about it just felt untruthful. Wrong.

He wouldn’t have let Rachel die if he could have saved her—but what if her death had caused the end of it? What if Kate’s had? Or Nathan’s himself?

Would Warren have let them die just to keep time from forever repeating itself?

 _No_ , he asserts to himself firmly. _I wouldn’t have. Death wasn’t worth it. No matter whose it had to be._

But … would it have been?

(Would he ever really have saved Kate if he hadn’t gotten lucky that one day? Would he have let her die just to break his own personal hell?)

He has no way of knowing just how true his rejection of the claim was. He can only hope he wouldn’t have traded a life for freedom, even at the most desperate of times. Even if he knew it would be the only way out.

(He can only hope he wouldn’t have become the kind of person to give up on someone just to save himself in the end.)

He has no way of knowing anything beyond what he’s lived through to this point, and dwelling on it is not something he can do. Not now. Not ever—not if he wanted to stay sane.

What he can do now is make sure Nathan’s trust is never misplaced.

That, at least, he’s pretty sure he can manage.

When Warren falls asleep that night, it’s curled up in a blanket next to Nathan’s couch with his phone charging across the room, Nathan on the couch with his hand draped from the edge. His fingers just barely brush Warren’s shoulder, and Warren doesn’t call him out on the miniscule contact. Because Warren needs it, and he knows Nathan understands this. Whale song echoes around them, put on by Warren for Nathan’s sake, and Warren can feel himself slipping away from consciousness even as Nathan keeps his exhausted gaze locked on the ceiling in a daze only an insomniac could replicate.

He hears Rachel’s name whispered softly, almost achingly, from beneath the song, and then Warren

                                                                                                                                                             is

 _gone_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that was so annoying to format holy shit


	8. Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it has officially been a year since Warren is Strange was tossed up here on good ol’ AO3! 
> 
> *golf claps*
> 
> okay, so, trigger warnings. remember those game warnings from the first fic? yeah, heed those.
> 
> (also I have no medical knowledge to speak of soooo some of this is definitely not correct to how things would really go but I tried)
> 
> as always, thanks for reading!

When Warren wakes up, he can’t breathe. There’s something on his chest. Something on his legs, his arms, his shoulders and hands. His left arm is pinned above him, and he can feel the ball of his thumb pressing between two of his ribs on the right.

He can’t breathe. He can’t see.

He doesn’t know where he is. His heartbeat thunders in his ears and something that sounds faintly like a tuba underwater echoes in his left ear.

Warren can’t think. He can’t move, he can’t breathe, and he. Can’t. Think.

Trapped.

Is he trapped? Where is he? Was this some trick? Had Warren made a mistake in trusting Nathan and everything up to this point had been a ploy for his ultimate demise?

Why would Nathan do that? How had he seemed so genuine? Nathan wasn’t an actor, wasn’t a con artist. Wasn’t capable of this level of manipulation on someone for such a long period of time.

... Was he?

Did Warren really _know_ Nathan?

 _No_ , he pushes back, one of the only coherent thoughts he can manage against the assault of the rest.

No, Nathan didn’t do this. Whatever this was, it can’t have been him. Warren refuses to even really begin to think of that possibility, because it can’t have been Nathan.

It can’t.

_Can’t._

Warren can’t breathe. He can’t think. His chest hurts and all he can feel is the darkness surrounding him.

The sound of the distorted instrument crescendos in his left ear, but he still can’t hear it in his right. He can’t hear anything in his right at all.

He thinks he might just be losing his mind.

Then, abruptly, he loses his sight all over again.

The darkness explodes with white, and Warren rasps out a scream that he can’t hear, his throat raw and painful and scratched around the soundless noise. Then, before he can even think, everything goes black once more, but the pain doesn’t stop.

Then someone’s telling him not to open his eyes. Not to move or talk. There’s unintelligible yelling all around him, questions and confusion and so many words he can’t understand, all sounding like they were filtered through a jelly of some kind, like a thick sort of water. Honey. Molasses. Dense and distorted and god, it hurts. It hurts like nothing Warren has ever felt before.

Something prods him and sends off jolts of lightning all along his body. He can feel his head lolling against his shoulder, held there by a hand supporting his neck, then against the soft, scratchy chest of someone else. Someone who’s holding him down.

Holding him up? He can’t tell. He can’t tell anything. It just hurts. It hurts more than he can seem to comprehend.

His body stings and throbs everywhere, and he can’t think about anything except for how much it aches.

What happened?

Warren doesn’t get a chance to wonder—if he even really could in the first place when all he could think about was his pain—because the noise in his ear turns into the roar of a train, and he starts screaming in panic as muscle memory and instinct kick in. He feels his body jerk, some animalistic need to survive taking him over and willing him to get safe get away don’t let the train hit him don’t let the storm come not again not again not again he had fixed it not again not again _not again_.

And then it all goes numb once more, and Warren thinks of nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

“The hell? Why is this kid not in ICU?”

“He doesn’t need to be. There are people who need the space.”

“He’s stable? Really?”

“Stable as someone who should be dead can be.”

“Have you contacted his parents?”

“He doesn’t have ID on him. We haven’t figured out who to call yet. They going to do a search on the school records, but they have their hands full with the recoveries right now.”

“Which site was he recovered from?”

“The rubble of the diner. Off the main road.”

“That wasn’t where the Blackwell kids were sent.”

“We don’t think he was on campus when the alert to seek shelter was given, assuming he’s Blackwell in the first place.”

“Only survivor?”

“So far there have only been a few unidentified bodies. No one else has been recovered alive yet. They’re still moving debris, but there’s layers and layers of the shit. We don’t know how he wasn’t crushed. It’s a miracle.”

“Whoever he is, someone up there wanted him alive.”

Warren can’t move his head, can’t open his eyes, but he can hear the words of the people surrounding him. Mostly. He can’t figure out what’s going on, because none of the words make much sense to him. All he knows of is the pain he still feels all over in waves of numbing throbs, and the music that still echoes faintly in his ear. He can’t think, and he can slowly feel himself slipping away again.

He understands nothing of what has happened or what is now going on around him. He feels as if he’s lost something important, something he knows, somewhere and somehow, he can never get back, but nothing in him is able to put a name to what it is he’s so devastatingly lost.

He wants to think, wants to try and figure out exactly what is happening to him before anything else can send him deeper, but he can’t bring himself to even form a coherent thought, not with how comforting the encroaching darkness feels to his muffled and tired mind. Not with how everything else feels like too much for him to bear.

He can’t do this.

He doesn’t want to do this.

So, with nothing but an existence full of confusion and endless questions, Warren accepts the darkness, and back under again he falls.

 

* * *

 

When Warren wakes up, he feels as if he’d swallowed an entire desert and then washed it all down with a drink from the Dead Sea. His throat is on fire, and all he can think about is getting water—how, though, his mind can’t comprehend beyond the painful thirst it felt.

Then, like a boon from the gods, something long and plastic is placed between his lips, and he closes his mouth around it on instinct even before a voice follows and tells him to drink.

 _I’m going to marry whoever invented water_ , Warren thinks as he nearly cries over the relief the sweet, cool liquid gives him, and then decides to reprimand himself for the obviously stupid, vaguely Trevor-esque mental statement once he had finished this entire supply of water he was being given.

“Easy,” the voice that had told him to drink says, and the straw is slipped from Warren’s grasp before he’s willing to give it up. He makes some sort of noise in protest, he can hear himself do it, but the voice only chuckles. “We don’t want you throwing all the water back up. Slow is the key for your recovery, all right? I’ll give you more in a second.”

It sounds like utter and actual bullshit to Warren’s slightly-addled brain, but common sense kicks into gear just as he’s opening his eyes to give the owner of the voice a piece of his mind, and he clamps his mouth shut on said mind piece in embarrassment, nearly sheering off his tongue in the process.

“ _Ow_ ,” he rasps, and the noise that comes out of his throat sounds nothing like the one he knew he was normally capable of producing. The source of the stranger’s voice—who Warren can now see is a man in light blue scrubs, though he can’t see his face as he bends over a table across the small room—chuckles again, but Warren’s suddenly too absorbed in taking in his surroundings to care much about that fact.

Because Warren is in a hospital room.

And Warren’s in a hospital bed.

Warren’s in a hospital bed, feeling like he just got steamrolled by The Iron Giant piloting the world’s largest monster truck. _Everything_ hurts, and he can feel from the awkward pulling sensation in more than one place on his body when he shifts just slightly that he definitely had stitches of some sort gracing his person and keeping his flesh held together. Because apparently it couldn’t do it itself anymore.

He really, really hoped that didn’t mean what he thought it might mean, but a flash of the diner collapsed into nothing but rubble crosses his mind, and, horrifyingly, Warren realizes with a jolt that this time, it wasn’t another vision he was experiencing.

Or whatever they had been. It doesn’t even matter, because this wasn’t one of them.

This was _real._

Oh, god. What happened to him?

“What happened?” Warren echoes at a croak the moment he has the person’s attention back, turning his face slightly away to avoid the straw the man—obviously his nurse—offers him again, despite his nearly aching urge to accept it. His mind is sluggishly aiming for a panicked race it can’t quite reach, and he needs to find something to tell him that what he thinks has happened isn’t true before he starts freaking out.

Something to tell him that this isn’t the aftermath of the event he’d lived through so many times and never managed to find the other end of. The event that he was supposed to change so that it wouldn’t happen, because it wasn’t meant to happen, because they all were supposed to live on and never know the fear of the storm that was destined to end them all.

But the words coming out of the nurse’s concerned mouth after only a beat of hesitation tell Warren everything he doesn’t want to hear.

He tells him about the storm, the destruction, the remains of the diner he was pulled from in words too careful and gentle to do the job Warren needs them to do.

He doesn’t tell Warren he was the only survivor. He doesn’t need to; Warren can tell by his face alone. All the others—Joyce, Alyssa, hell, even Frank and his dog—dead.

Warren is numb. He’s gone numb and blank with shock. He can’t process it, this can’t be real. It isn’t real. The world he had saved was real. This ... this was a loop. Something had happened.

No. He was having a nightmare. A vivid one. A breakdown, from his psychosis. Something. _Something_.

 _Anything_.

It couldn’t be this. Anything else. Anything but _this_.

A hand on his shoulder snaps him directly out of his attempt at a spiral, and whatever skill he had gained from having lived too many times over kicks into gear and switches Warren’s brain into lockdown. Because Warren doesn’t have time for this.

If this was a loop, there had to be a way out. There’s no way this was the end.

The storm had come in this version of life he was living. That means it can’t have been the end.

There’s _no way_. Warren refuses to believe this was really where he belonged, because nothing about it felt right.

This wasn’t real.

Something about his change in demeanor must be reflected on the outside, because the hand on his shoulder squeezes, and Warren’s gaze finally focuses on the owner of the hand.

“Your parents will be here soon,” the nurse says, completely catching Warren off guard, because that’s the last thing he had been expecting the nurse to say. “They’ve been here since you were brought in and identified, but you were only just moved into this room, which allows visiting again. We contacted them not long ago to let them know we were waking you, but you woke up faster than we were expecting you to.”

It takes a moment for Warren’s thoughts to become verbal, and he winces when his voice once again scratches out of the confines of his sandpapered throat, “You put me under? Did I have surgery?”

“No. Believe it or not, you didn’t need it.” The nurse shakes his head minutely, but Warren can feel the sheer disbelief over Warren’s survival without him having to explicitly express it. It tells Warren he shouldn’t be alive right now, and he can’t really say he disagrees.

This is not where he belongs.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asks to distract himself. The nurse pulls his hand away and leans over to grab Warren’s chart.

“You cracked your third and fifth ribs, to start. A number of superficial lacerations.” The nurse peeks up from beneath his lashes. “You needed so many stitches in so many places, you probably feel like that patchwork lady from that one movie about Halloween.”

“Nightmare Before Christmas,” Warren mumbles.

“That’s the one. You inhaled a lot of smoke from an explosion that happened close to the diner we recovered you from, so your lungs and throat will hurt for a while, but you were put on oxygen the moment we pulled you. It’s—” The nurse hesitates. “It’s shocking how lucky you were.”

Warren doesn’t have anything to say to that, because he knows he was. And, right now, it’s the last thing he wanted to be. He didn’t want to be here.

“I hear a horn in my ear,” he explains quietly instead of addressing his luck, pointing to his left ear where the noise had never stopped. It wasn’t nearly as loud as it had been the first time he noticed it happening, but he could still hear a whisper of the distorted noise like the echo of a spirit.

The nurse frowns at his chart. “Looks like your eardrum ruptured. I’m afraid we aren’t going to repair it with the damage it sustained, because it should heal itself anyway. Is the ringing loud?”

“No,” he replies, then shakes his head until it sends a sharp stinging throughout his skull, which is immediately. He winces.

“Careful. Your ear is damaged. You may have made it out of this nightmare without any irreversible damage to your spine or head, miraculously, but it’s not a good idea to agitate anything.”

Warren purses his lips. “It’s not a ringing.”

“Pardon?”

“The noise in my ear.” Warren points again, despite knowing it wasn’t helping anything. “It’s not a ringing, like you get when you listen to loud music too long. I hear a horn or something.”

The nurse blinks at him, Warren’s words giving him a quizzical sort of expression. “I’ve never heard of that in my time, but it’s not unusual for you to have ringing or phantom noises in an ear you’ve lost total hearing in.”

 _Great_ , Warren thinks. _Because I didn’t have enough trouble convincing myself I wasn’t batshit insane the first time I had this little joyride through the fabric of time. Now I’m hearing shit that isn’t actually there._

The nurse is still frowning at him even after the moment that passes where Warren doesn’t say anything, but Warren is saved from offering a reply that doesn’t sound absolutely cracked by the arrival of his parents rushing in and doing their best to keep from smothering him—which they don’t fully succeed in doing, but Warren wants to deal with the pain their hugs give him anyway, because he needs the contact right now more than he cares about the aches that flare off everywhere in return.

Despite the overall emotional turmoil that the reunion throws all three of them—Warren and his parents both—into, none of them attempt at starting a conversation in favor of the charged atmosphere and desperate touches to Warren’s face and shoulders and back, like they couldn’t believe he was whole and alive and awake. Frankly, neither could Warren.

Nothing much is said—not until Warren tells them he wants to be released as soon as possible. He doesn’t tell them why—because he can’t, how could he ever explain any of that? —but that doesn’t sit well with his nurse, whom had kept quiet and watchful from the nook of the small room up until Warren voiced his need to leave.

“I’m afraid you’ll be kept here for a while longer, Mr. Graham,” the nurse tells him gently, but Warren’s throat constricts all the same, because he _needed_ to get out of here as soon as possible so he could find a way back. “Your parents have to be the ones to discharge you if the doctor won’t, but, obviously, we all would advise against it.”

“What?” Warren says almost distractedly, the idea of staying in this time nearly too much for him to think past at the given moment, “but I’m seventeen. I should have some sort of say in—”

“You’re sixteen.” His father looks at the nurse in alarm, but his mother’s eyes never leave his. Her unwavering gaze pierces into him, alight with a knowing sort of suspicion, and he’s overcome with a wave of guilt he can’t abate. Her eyes try to glean information from him, but what could Warren say?

How could he explain this? How could he explain _anything_?

“You won’t be seventeen until next month, Warren,” he dad continues, turning back to Warren again with a worried look that only spurs more guilt.

Fuck.

Warren’s mind races as it starts to flip into the mode he had become accustomed to back when he’d needed to remember the loops, an effort he had to take as they cycled through, so he could keep from slipping up at every turn and making missteps every time he set his proverbial foot down.

It was still October, his brain told him as he clicked back in into the mode. Just barely, but it was October all the same.

Again.

He wasn’t seventeen. He was sixteen.

 _Again_.

He was sixteen all over again.

 _I should almost be eighteen at this point_ , something murmurs at the back of his mind. But he has to ignore it, because that time hasn’t passed. None of that time has passed anymore, and he was sixteen again. Sixteen, seventeen in November.

God, he hated time.

“Oh,” he says, then attempts at a splutter, doing his best to seem confused. “I thought I was out longer. A guy can hope, right? Still no NC-17 films for me when I get out of here, I guess.”

He tacks on a wince of a grin to his verbal charade, hoping it’ll add the icing needed to cover up the instability of it all. Still, his mother doesn’t look convinced at his façade, but his father’s shoulders relax visibly at Warren’s shot at a cover-up, and he deems it a necessary try that he won’t be doing again. At least, not like that.

He doesn’t have to fake the exhaustion that overcomes him swiftly and suddenly mere moments after his parents start up a string of information about when he could be released, and his mother cuts herself off mid-sentence the moment Warren starts to slump back into his pillows even the slightest of amounts.

He doesn’t want them to leave him, not really, but he doesn’t feel the tug of sheer loss their departure brings until they’re kissing him goodbye and promising to come back within the hour with the things they’d dropped the moment they’d gotten the phone call that he was waking up—so he doesn’t have the words needed to ask them to stay until they’re heading out the door.

And then, as if to keep him from saying anything at all, standing in the doorway is a phantom Warren had only heard about before but never seen, and any protest he might have had for the adults walking through the creature as if it weren’t really there vanish from Warren’s mind.

The ghost deer watches him silently, and Warren’s chest blooms with a chaotic mixture of hope and doom all in one swift burst.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t say anything to the ghost—not when he first spots it in the doorway, and not when it ventures into his room after being detected and stares him down from the side of his bed. Because his nurse doesn’t seem to see it, and the staring alone that Warren had been doing was more than enough for the nurse to ask not once, but twice within a handful of minutes if Warren was feeling anything strange. That gets him to stop staring, and he struggles to keep his attention elsewhere for as long as it takes for his nurse to leave the room. The moment he’s gone, Warren’s gaze darts back again. The ghost hasn’t moved.

“What are you doing in here?” he asks it first, at a low whisper, because he has no idea what else to ask something he could very well just be hallucinating. The doe, however, doesn’t respond, but Warren pushes on anyway. Because, if she wasn’t a hallucination, she had to be here for a reason, right? “Are you the deer Max saw? When we were trying to fix things?”

This time, the deer dips her head just the slightest of amounts, and the unexpected motion sparks such a surge of excitement that he finds himself halfway out of his bed before he’s even realized he’s moved at all, the aching the motion gives him pinging off in the back of his brain like forgotten notions. He grins at the deer, questions bursting forth from his lack of them just previously all at once, and he nearly spews every one of them at her in his eagerness until a single one touches the tip of his tongue and drains him of everything but dread before he’s even finished asking it, and it comes out as a choked “Why—am I here?”

And, just like that, the panic sets in, and Warren has to struggle to keep his thoughts in place even as they all spill out from between his teeth, the doe doing nothing but watching on in silent observation.

“Why am I here?” he pushes at the ghost, feeling his throat strain about the words as they build to a cry. Because she _had_ to know. She was a part of this, she had to be. She’d been there all along, and if she wasn’t here for Max, then— “What did I fuck up? Why am I back here? What did I _do_?!”

But the deer just watches him, its ear flicking once as its transparent eyes stare back at Warren unwaveringly. Warren grinds his teeth in frustration, then lets out a hoarse, sharp noise from between them.

“What the hell do you want? How do I get back? How the fuck do I get out of here?” he pleads, fists curled so tight by his sides that his palms pinch painfully from the way his nails dig into them. “What do I _do_?  _How_ do I get _home_?! I want to go home, Rachel! I _don’t_ _belong_ here! Tell me how to go home, _please_.”

The deer’s head lilts to the side, and Warren feels himself stop breathing as the realization hits him all at once.

_Rachel._

“You …?” he tries at no more than the memory of a whisper. For a moment, the world goes white, and when it comes back, Warren realizes he’s doubled over in his bed with his hands tangled in the stiff white sheets, and the doe is beside him. She’s so close that it sets every inch of his skin on edge, and goosebumps spring into manifestation. It’s a feeling he knows almost _too_ well.

“Rachel,” he breathes to her, and, finally, she dips her head so low that her ear phases through his knee. “Why are _you_ here? Why—What the hell is going on? Why am _I_ here?”

Warren’s voice is painfully pleading, his words pulling straight from his heart as he begs for some form of clarification, but he knows he can’t get an answer from her. Because ghost deer can’t speak.

And, as if to punctuate a statement she didn’t make, Rachel turns away from Warren and starts walking out of his room. Warren, in his confusion and frustration, doesn’t follow her immediately—not until she stops just outside the door and looks at him until he catches on.

“What are you doing?” Warren asks her as he finally pulls himself up and follows, then winces when someone in a set of pink scrubs covered in cats gives him an alarmed look as he walks out of the room without anyone to follow him.

Right. Ghost deer no one else could see. Warren just looked like he was talking to himself, despite the lack of brain damage the scans had shown.

Great.

Warren clamps his mouth shut on the dozens of questions he wants to ask—or, yell, really, because nothing made a lick of sense and he wanted answers he knew he couldn’t get from her—if only because he really didn’t want them freaking out on him over something else. He follows her silently down the length of hall she traverses with the grace only a spirit animal could wield, and he only feels slightly oafish with his rubber-soled socks and sore legs, which make him even more ungainly than he had before he’d woken up in the rubble of a restaurant and sustained fairly widespread injuries. Previous shit balance and relative lack of elegance aside.

Warren almost walks through her when she stops abruptly outside of a room with an open door, and he has to restrain himself from spitting out a curse when he misjudges the traction on his socks and nearly topples over in his attempt to halt and not eat the floor. He takes a moment to regain himself (and shoot the deer a squinted look) before peering into the room Rachel so obviously wanted him to creep on.

It’s a single room not unlike that of Warren’s, with a bed, a chair, a TV, and all the assorted things a hospital room tended to have by default. The curtains to the bed are pulled back, and in the bed sits a dark-haired man with his head bent over a magazine that sits in his lap. He’s older, if the gray at his temples are any indication, and a pair of glasses sit perched on the near-edge of his nose, waiting to be pushed back up. Something about him seems familiar, but the fog in Warren’s brain wants him to work at it, and he has to take a second to really look at the guy in order to place him. The continued horn in his ear does nothing to help the process.

It takes long enough for Warren’s staring to reach creeper-stalker level at least thrice over, but, finally, the recognition clicks in, and Warren’s body breaks out in goosebumps.

Because it was the janitor from Blackwell, sitting in the bed.

He had survived the storm.

The ghost doe ignores Warren’s shock and phases through the wall, the doorframe clipping off her left leg at the shoulder in a way that makes all of this only feel that much more unreal to Warren, and the janitor—Samuel Taylor, his room tag reads, because Warren had forgotten what his name was—tilts his dipped head just slightly to look at her.

So, he can see her like Warren can. Okay.

The fuck does _that_ mean, then?

Warren takes a deep breath, loud enough for Samuel to hear him, and steps into the room with the intent on greeting Samuel, only to stop dead in his tracks before he’d really broached the room’s perimeter.

Because when Warren walks into the room, Samuel looks up at Warren, and the look in his swollen eyes shocks Warren to the core.

“You know,” Warren blurts out without even offering a greeting. It’s not a question that Warren poses to him. It’s not even remotely close to being one at all. “You know about it,” Warren insists, his hands clenching to fists at his side and his socked foot thumping slightly in the step he almost trips over yet again. His throat turns to sandpaper and his saliva to dust, making his words dry and painful to speak. “About what happened. You know what happened to me.”

Samuel’s gaze doesn’t waver. There is gauze all along his head, pasted from hairline to jaw, with butterfly bandages skirting the curve of a bruised and sunken-looking eye socket.

Much like Warren, it seems Samuel’s survival was miraculous, because he looks like the living dead, and Warren had no doubt he felt like it, too.

Slowly, Samuel inclines his head. “Samuel knows what has happened to the young traveler,” he says slowly, his nasally voice coarse and faint. Warren takes another step closer, and the doe turns her ethereal head to him as Samuel continues. “The storm has brought Samuel stories as it passed. You have visited many times, haven’t you?”

It takes a moment for Warren to realize Samuel means “times” not in the sense of days or visits, but in the sense of loops. The sheer fact that Samuel speaks of them alone almost sends Warren to the floor with relief, because it was the first true sliver of proof (if you could even call it proof) that Warren’s journey hadn’t been all in his head even now, despite where he had found himself.

“Too many,” Warren agrees almost desperately. His hands twist in the hem of his shirt, and he has to keep his mouth slightly open to accommodate the small near-gasps his breathing has decided to become, but he doesn’t take his eyes off of Samuel. “Do you—do you know what happened to me? Do you—know why?”

Samuel shakes his head. “Time does not flow like we expect it to. Samuel wishes he had been told more about your journey, but the guardians only have so much to share with us. They keep their secrets very safe. Can’t tell you what happened, no, but you did the right thing, young Warren. You did very good.”

“But everyone died,” Warren blurts out despite himself, and nearly bites his lip off (again) when he hurries to stop that train of thought in favor of another. “I mean—” he splutters, “I mean, this time. Everyone’s dead, right? That’s what they told me.”

“But this is not the time for you, is it?” Samuel says calmly, almost as if he was talking to himself.

Warren hesitates. “But this is where I am. This is where I woke up.” Was Warren right? This _isn’t_ his time? This wasn’t where he belonged? “I don’t—Rachel sent me here, right? Didn’t you?” he asks the deer directly, then only feels a little stupid when she, of course, offers no answer to his question.

Samuel’s mouth turns up in a half-grin, his injuries keeping his face from completing the expression he wanted to convey. “The dead are not always so wise,” he rasps softly, eyes straying to the space beside Warren, where Rachel stood watching them both. “No, no. She did not mean for this. Did you, spirit guide? No. More loops than you wanted. Mistakes, mistakes.”

Warren’s eyes flash to the ghost beside him. “You— What? Rachel?” Warren’s gaze snaps back to Samuel again, confusion writhing dangerously in his mind. “You think she did _that_ to me? The loops? She didn’t come to me when I was looping—she only showed to Max! Did you—” Again, back to the doe Warren’s eyes snap, and he’s pretty sure he hasn’t blinked once. “Did you do that to me? Or just Max? Why— Fuck, wait, you can’t even talk! _Shit_ ,” he hisses the final word mostly to himself, finally closing his burning eyes and shaking his head in frustration. Why couldn’t anything just be _easy_? Just this once, this single time, it would have been really nice!

“Maybe not all mysteries need an answer,” Samuel tells him gently, after Warren’s had a moment to himself. “The doe is a mischievous one. Maybe you have spurned her. Or maybe …” Samuel trails off almost wistfully, his eyes straying back to the ghost standing like a sentry by Warren’s side. “Maybe this is the end. Once you leave, you never worry again.”

“I don’t know _how_ to leave,” Warren pushes out through gritted teeth. “Hell, all this time I thought I died when I reset, but it turns out I might have been able to live this whole time!”

Not that that was what Warren would have wanted in the end, anyway. Someone else may have been able to live with the consequences of everyone being killed at the end, but Warren would never have been able to handle that kind of guilt. Even if he had known he’d live, he still would have pushed to save everyone. Even if it had taken ten loops, twenty, more than he could count in the end of it all—Warren would not have let everyone perish by his own failure. Not everyone.

Not _anyone_.

(He knows this. He  _knows_ this. He would not have let anyone die if he could save them. This time, Warren knows he would have kept trying, because _no one_ was worth giving up on.)

“Maybe death is the only way to leave. Maybe death is the second chance.” Samuel’s gritty, nasally voice cuts into Warren’s mental assertion to himself, and the look Warren instinctually gives him is one he has no name for, because he feels as if he had been told a secret he was never meant to hear, and his mind is sent into a spiral the second Samuel’s words have meaning to him.

“What?” he asks slowly, then, frantically, “What do you mean death is—”

“Sir, you’re not supposed to be in here. Mr. Taylor isn’t allowed visitors right now.”

Warren turns on his heel (and almost stumbles over himself when he does, but a hand is instantly there to steady him) to find a short nurse with wildly curly hair wrestled into a topknot kind of bun, frowning at him. Her grip is firm as she helps keep him from falling through the ghost creature she obviously doesn’t see, and her expression is stern. Warren can’t even find the words to argue with her as she guides him out with the hold that doesn’t slacken until he’s back out of the room with the door closed behind him (and through Rachel, but she doesn’t seem to mind—or even notice, actually, based on how she doesn’t immediately move away from the slab of door that cuts her torso in half).

Warren’s too distracted by what Samuel had said to him, the words swirling around in the space between his ears, to really protest once he’s ejected from the room. He doesn’t even hear what the nurse says to him as he guides him away, nor does he realize she’s spoken to him at all until she touches his shoulder and brings his attention back onto her.

“You’re the other Blackwell survivor,” she says to him then, her expression one of concern, and a warning light flashes in Warren’s head.

 _You_ do not  _want to have this conversation_ , it says to him, and he takes its heed at full-fucking-throttle without even hesitating.

“Yup, that’s me,” he squeaks in an obviously-inappropriate answer to the question, if the shift in the nurse’s face is anything to go by. He takes a step backwards, and then another, his hands raised up as if to ward her off. “I’m—I need to go back to my room. I’ll just—”

Warren doesn’t finish his sentence—he’s turned and gone, his feet doing a quick shuffle-walk in the vague direction he knows his room had been in, and he can tell by feel alone that Rachel is not far behind him, like a chill that tickles his spine but never really sinks in. He really doesn’t want to think too deeply about that, though, so he doesn’t. Ghost things could be thought about another time, when he didn’t have other things he needed to worry about more.

His nurse—fuck, what was his name again? —greets him nonchalantly when Warren returns, scribbling things on his whiteboard and telling him something about dinner that Warren doesn’t manage to catch even remotely, but nods all the same, his mind still leagues away from anything he probably should have focused on instead, if only for a moment, so that he didn’t miss the way his nurse’s expression turns suspicious as he glances at Warren over his own shoulder. Warren’s far too preoccupied.

Because what did Samuel mean by death? Was Samuel telling Warren he needed to off himself to get back to where he wanted to be? Was death the way out of this place? Or was Warren actually dead right now, and everything before had been a false claim to what he had in store for his afterlife?

But—no. That couldn’t have made sense. Why would he be back here? To kill himself and find a way back?

Was this some sort of test?

But for what? And who the hell was testing him?

What the hell did Samuel _mean_? And how fucking crazy did Samuel think Warren was? How fucking crazy was _Samuel_ to suggest something like dying to find another way?

… Was that even what he was suggesting in the first place?

(And, despite Warren not wanting to think too hard about it, wasn’t that exactly what had happened in every loop? Was this all just repeating itself again?)

Jesus fucking hell. Could nothing just be a _little_ simple for him, even this once? Was that really so much to ask?

“And you can’t even help me, can you?” Warren mutters to the deer bitterly as she lifts her head to look at him curiously, his nurse having left the room for a moment for something Warren didn’t bother wondering about. “No one can help me, because Max is gone, Nathan’s probably locked up and is back to hating me down to my atoms thanks to that asshole Jefferson, and you’re a nonverbal fucking corporeal creature that can’t say jack shit to me! _Augh_!”

Warren squeezes his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his palms deep into his sockets as if they could erase the imprint of the doe that was plastered across the backs of his eyelids. It doesn’t work, but the pressure releases some of the tension in him, so he doesn’t immediately stop the motion in favor of returning to the deer just yet. He takes just a few more moments to himself, knowing he probably had a lot in store for him if he wanted to get back to his loop. Especially if he was working with a ghost that couldn’t actually talk to him. Which means, much like it had been all the times he’d looped before figuring out he needed Nathan’s help, Warren was on his own yet again.

Yeah, this was going to be great.

Warren sighs, pulling the breath deep from within him, and then he opens his eyes again, only to regret the decision immensely.

Because when he does, the deer is no longer there.

When he does, he finds himself back in the diner, with the rain and wind screaming outside and the windows barricaded uselessly against the train that he instinctually zeroes in on and can hear coming closer and closer. He doesn’t have time to feel anything but confusion and the beginnings of a feral sort of terror before the noise in his ear wails loud enough to make him clutch his head in pain as the train crashes into the diner, throwing him sideways into the bar and into a blackness he knows all too well.

Warren gasps, rocketing up into a sitting position, and the next thing he knows he’s on the cold, hard floor and winded from the fall he’d taken from his stool. Brooke peers down at him from her over her table, concern quickly starting to overwrite the humor that had previously curled her lips just moments before.

Warren can’t think. Can’t breathe.

No.

“Warren?” Brooke calls quietly as people start to circle around him. Warren can hear her, knows what he must look like sprawled on the floor in his shock, but he can’t pull away from it, can’t divert attention away from the scene he’s creating. _What was happening to him?_ “Are you okay? Was it a nightmare?”

No. _No._

Warren scrambles up from the floor, the stool he’d been sitting in screeching against the linoleum tiles and the people backing away from the crowd they’d created above him in almost absolute silence. Ms. Grant calls to him as she starts to approach with the school phone clutched in her grip, but he ignores her as he lunges at his desk, hands ripping apart his planner in his attempt to reach the date bookmarked.

His heart plummets when he finds it, and everything around him turns to white noise.

He’s back again.

Why is he back again?

Why is he not in his room, like he’d been all the times before?

_Why is he back again?!_

The white noise the room has become screams in Warren’s head, his heartbeat throbbing an erratic rhythm that would worry him at any other point in time.

It’s then he realizes his ear still hasn’t stopped ringing with the odd noise it had retained from the moment he’d found himself in a different future, but beyond the recognition of it, Warren can’t react to that particular constant. He can’t give a single shit about it, despite the fact it was the only thing happening to him that had stayed the same.

Warren can’t care at all, because he’s too busy shoving people out of his way, gasping and rushing out the door of his science classroom, feeling just as insane as he probably looked.

_No!_

“Mr. Graham!” Ms. Grant calls, but Warren’s already gone, falling against the lockers once when he makes too sharp of a turn down the hallway in his rapid attempt at escaping the confines of the school.

This isn’t right. This couldn’t be real.

Whatever was happening, he has to get out.

He has to wake up.

_This isn’t right._

“No,” he finally gasps the moment the entrance doors are within his sight, and he nearly falls from his own equilibrium when he barrels at them like a bull from Hell, fingers clumsily tapping down onto the surface of the cold floor once as he stumbles over himself. “No, no, no _, no._ ”

The door bursts open with a sound like a backed-up cannon from the force of Warren throwing himself against it, and everyone in the hallway jumps and screams in alarm. The door bounces off the wall with a sharp noise and then back into Warren—who’s heaving and frantically searching the place that was definitely _not_ the school courtyard—and he doesn’t even flinch when it nearly cracks his nose flat against his face with rebound, his elbow jutting out to push it away again as his hand flies to his face.

The dorms.

He was in the dorms.

He had left the main building and somehow entered—

How the fuck—

How, why, what the fuck was—

“Hey,” someone familiar calls, and Warren’s eyes flash to the source to find Trevor slowly approaching him with his hands out in what was usually intended to be a calming kind of gesture. “Graham, right? Where’s the fire?” he continues, still walking slowly towards Warren, but it’s clear Warren has unnerved everyone in the hall, including him.

“Where’s Nathan?” Warren asks in a voice far too panicked to sound reasonable, looking away from Trevor to see if Nathan was one of the people he’d spooked, but Nathan doesn’t seem to be in the hallway, and he doesn’t emerge when his name is called.

Trevor can’t hide his surprise; he stops walking and his hands falter. “Nathan?” Trevor repeats in confusion. “No idea. Probably in his room? Hey, you gotta chill a little. You’re freaking people out. What’s going on? What did Prescott do to you?”

 _His room_ , Warren thinks, outright ignoring Trevor as he goes on to ask Warren if he wanted him to call someone for help.

He had to find Nathan.  _Now_.

Warren pushes past Trevor and scrambles down the hall, ignoring the people who immediately slide out of his way and eye him warily as he passes them, and he doesn’t even fully stop when he reaches the space where Nathan’s and Warren’s doors stand. He grabs the handle of Nathan’s and turns it in his palm as his body twists at the waist with its own momentum, and then he pushes into Nathan’s room in a way not unlike the time he’d confronted Nathan and fixed everyone once and for all.

Or, so he’d thought before all of this had happened.

“Nathan!” Warren calls desperately, throwing himself over the threshold of the door, only to suddenly lose any daylight that might have aided in his travels into Nathan’s blacked-out room, the hallway offering nothing by way of light despite the way it had been lit just before Warren had opened the door.

The room has a single light offering any means of sight, but it’s all Warren needs to see the two occupants he has just stumbled in on.

Despite his ability to take it all in, Warren can’t seem to comprehend what it is he’s seeing.

Chloe’s half-sprawled out on Nathan’s bed, her wild hair plastered to her face and eyes wide and red and panicked from where they snap to Warren. Her beanie is missing, and her pants are unbuttoned—and her shirt’s at the point of being torn by the grip Nathan has on it, Nathan himself seemingly frozen in confusion at Warren’s presence in his doorway. Chloe has a double-handed grip his jacket in turn, but neither of them seem to remember this as they both stare at Warren.

 _He doesn’t look any different_ , Warren thinks idly as it all registers to him at once, bringing along a sort of horror Warren had never before experienced. Chloe twists towards him jerkily, and the movement snaps his attention back onto her.

“Don’t just stand there!” she screeches at him, though the words are slurred and distorted to the point where, if Warren hadn’t been used to deciphering Nathan’s speech when he reached a point of no-return, he never would have understood what she was trying to say. The irony was not lost on him. “ _Help_ _me!_ ”

Her words seem to jolt Nathan, and he immediately starts to struggle out of the crappy hold Chloe’s obviously-drugged self has on his jacket, shouting what could probably have been real curses if Nathan had ever learned how to do anything but mash words together and hope for the best when he was riled up and high beyond belief.

 _His gun_ , the only rational part left of Warren’s brain warns him almost nonchalantly as Nathan yanks himself free and lurches to the other side of the room. If Warren had been less shocked at the scene before him, he might have actually heeded the part of his mind that was trying to keep him from getting shot.

But he doesn’t, because the sight of Nathan about to—rape? No. No, he wouldn’t, he _wouldn’t_ , no version of Nathan would never sink _that_ low, and Warren refused to believe that was what he had witnessed upon entering Nathan’s bedroom. And yet, the spectacle is so jarring for Warren that he doesn’t move, not even when Nathan jumps up from wherever he’d been hiding his gun and points it right at Warren (with shaky aim and a terrible stance, you should never use a single hand to wield a gun like that—he really didn’t _actually_ know how to use a gun, did he?), nor when Chloe suddenly shrieks at Warren to get down.

Warren doesn’t move, and Nathan fires.

The shot, somehow, is true enough regardless of where Nathan was aiming, and Warren feels the force of the bullet piercing through the flesh of his neck, sees the spurt of the ripped artery meeting the air before the idea of pain even manifests, and then Warren is falling.

He blacks out before he even hits the floor, and then comes to with a scream curdled in his throat, his mind swathed in the feeling of absolute betrayal.

It’s raining—hard, though not nearly as hard as it would if the storm had arrived—but the roar of the pure horror in Warren’s mind stops him from immediately trying to figure out where he is or why he’s drenched to the bone in clothes he knows he wasn’t wearing a moment before. Warren has no idea where he is, and Warren has no idea what was happening to him.

He can’t think, and he can’t move.

His hands are wrapped around his throat—whole and unbloodied, if not a little clammy from the cold rain—in a gesture he doesn’t remember making.

All he can hear is rain, and nothing feels right. Warren’s mind won’t work.

Then, a scream filters through the drumming, distant but sharp, and Warren instinctively turns towards it to see a figure through the downpour, stepping off of a concrete step a few feet away from him.

 _No_ , Warren realizes, the thought sharp despite the cotton that filled his head. _Not a step._

A lip. An edge of a building, high enough for Warren to notice the shadows of trees just beyond the scene that seems to have suddenly slowed down before him. Warren was on the roof of a building. No—not just any building.

Warren was on top of the school dormitories.

 _No_.

“Kate,” Warren whispers, lurching forward on the toes of his shoes without a single rational thought to manifest behind the action of pure predisposition. It wasn’t an action of memory, exactly, but, Warren has no other word for what he’s doing as he tilts into the lunge. “Kate,” he tries again without stopping for breath, and clips himself off as he reaches a screech, “Kate, _no_! _Stop_! _KATE!_ ”

But Warren knows even before he’s let the second word ring through the wet air that he was far too late. Kate was tipped over the edge before Warren’s heel had even slipped up from the pavement with movement, and Warren knows he never really had the chance to save her. He was never the one meant to save her.

Behind him, a door bangs open and a man’s voice shouts at him, but when Warren frantically whips around to face the man he finds he’s no longer on the rooftop, and his clothes are dry as if they’d never touched rain in their life.

The room is strangely lit—like a studio set-up Warren had only seen in movies before, and Max is duct-taped to a chair in a scene he remembers vividly, but she’s not coming around like she had been the last time he’d played witness to the event. Blood trails from both of her nostrils—like Max had complained still happened sometimes long after her powers had left, the powers being the cause of nosebleeds on more than one occasion.

She looks— _dead_.

Air rasps into Warren’s lungs as he pulls it in with breaths he didn’t realize he’d stopped taking in his shock, and he falls to his knees with a hoarse, quiet cry that rouses Max from her slumber and sends a dizzying punch of relief right to Warren’s gut in the same instance. Her head twitches against her chest once, twice, in time with the breathes Warren can’t seem to take quietly, and her mouth gasps silently as her eyes flutter open.

 _Thank god,_ Warren thinks, and nearly chokes on the cry that tries to rush up his throat.

“ _Max_ ,” Warren tries to call instead, but he doesn’t think he manages. Because he’s still choked up, and he still can't begin to fathom what’s going on.

It’s too much—this is all too much.

Warren scrambles back to his feet and slides up to her side, his hands slipping up to cradle her cheeks in his palms. He swallows thickly, wordlessly begging her to come to. He’d never experienced this—not really. He’d been a part of a planned kidnap, never a real one. _This_ had never happened to him—and he didn’t know what to do.

“Warren?” Max slurs, her head lolling and her eyes blinking at him in confusion. She watches him through a squinted gaze as he shakily nods his head in confirmation, and then, suddenly, she’s fully awake.

“No,” she says, her eyes snapping instantly to panic and flicking to look over Warren’s shoulder. She tries to wrench her head out of Warren’s grasp, and Warren lets her go as if she had shocked him, his hands hovering by the sides of her face but unwilling to touch her again after the rejection. “No,” she hisses, “no, you have to get out. He’s here—he’s going to kill you if he finds you. You can’t do anything, Warren, you have to go get help. Get Madsen, get the police—someone! Get help! Get _out of here_!”

“But—” Warren starts, already back onto his feet and taking a step backwards, but Max’s gaze snapping back to him cuts him off. She looks terrified.

“Warren, go,” she pleads at a gentle hiss of a whisper. “ _Please_.”

It’s a single word, but the feeling behind it is something so unnamable in its desperation that it slices deeper than Warren has the words for, slicking deep beneath his ribs and wrenching him apart in the spare second Warren allows himself before he’s giving into Max’s plea.

He needed to get help. He couldn’t do this on his own. He couldn’t take on Jefferson when he had nothing to fight him with.

He needed to save Max.

Even if this wasn’t the Max he was destined to rescue—he couldn’t just walk away from her. He needed to try.

Warren had to go.

With as reassuring of a nod he could possibly give to Max, Warren turns, toes bent as if to take the motion she had spurred at a run, and, like someone flipping the radio dial to a dead station, Warren’s mind goes utterly blank.

Then a pure, all-encompassing static starts up in his head like a low hum built instantaneously to a roar, and his heart starts to pound immediately, the throbbing beats reverberating up the length of his throat and choking him, and he’s effectively stunned where he stands.

Oh, god. No.

No, no, no.

Blood, just barely cooled and half-congealed, sticks to the bottoms of his shoes when he finally stumbles a half-step away from the sight, sticking to the floor it touches back down on.

There’s a figure slumped against a far wall next to a tall rack of photography supplies, a bullet wound bleeding an imperfect circle over the left side of his chest and a ragged slash across the curve of his shoulder as if he had fought to escape; his blood sprayed against the wall above him and dragged down until it disappeared behind the body. A dark, almost opaque shadow falls just across his face enough to obscure all but his mouth and the very tip of his nose—but Warren knows who it is on pure instinct alone. It’s impossible for him to not.

He knows that face better than his own—but never like this.

He had been warned once, in a message he had not been the original recipient of, but Warren had never known about _this_.

Warren turns and doesn’t bother looking at where he’s going. He doesn’t care where, as long as it’s away from him. He needs to get out. He needs to get out now, before he loses his hold on everything and can never come back.

A raw, hiccup of a moan slips up from his chest as he barrels over the threshold of the darkened door he doesn’t recognize and is neatly cut off when he tips and falls over a crate placed precariously in his way. His chin knocks against the wood of the floor it meets sharply and his teeth clack together painfully, no doubt chipping a tooth or two in the process. He barely has time to make a noise of pain when a sigh alerts him that he’s not alone, and he takes a moment to linger in the feelings of pain and loss before cracking open an eye to make sure it’s not anyone he left on bad terms with.

He doesn’t recognize the room he’s in—it almost looks like a wooden sort of shack room, or a treehouse of some kind. There are dozens of pictures plastered in clusters all along the wood plank walls that matched the floor beneath him, and a handful of crates dot the space around him like the one he had gracefully tripped over in his attempt to flee from—

They seemed to be repurposed tables, judging on the placement and the fact the one he had upended had been covered in papers and magazines, which were now scattered everywhere around him. Magazines with slim, beautiful women wearing what was probably fashionable clothing but looked like it was more hassle than it was worth to Warren. Papers with applications, scrawled details, and messes of scratched out and re-written lists.

Warren switches his searching gaze away in favor of eying up the couch he finds across the length of the room, and specifically the set of shoes he’s level with from his position of kissing the floor with his now-bloodied lips. With a soft groan, Warren presses his hand to his aching mouth and slowly starts to pull himself up, giving himself a better view of what was right before him and promptly spiraling him right back into utter confusion.

There’s a girl sitting on the couch with her head resting on the curl of her propped-up fist, watching him, and, for a moment, all Warren can do is stare at her in shock as her face registers in Warren’s memory with a jolt like pure lightning racing down his spine. Because he _does_ recognize her, even if before she had only ever been portrayed to him in a grayscale that had clearly never done her any justice.

She was the one person Warren had never had the chance to save.

Rachel Amber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand now I have some news. I might not be updating for a bit! Camp NaNo is starting in July and I hadn’t written anything of my own in too long. I gotta try to not write fanfiction. just for a bit.
> 
> will that work completely? definitely not. I’ll still write some fic. but probably not enough for a full update (unless you want a super, super short chapter next). stay tuned, though, because Rachel is not done with Warren yet. ;)


	9. Rachel Amber

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon? Never heard of her.
> 
> Also: so much dialogue. So sorry.
> 
> (so yeah still haven't played/watched BtS, so all of Rachel here is based purely on what I've seen in things like fanart and such. this chapter will likely one day get a rework, too, because it's so damn long and I haven't yet figured out how to condense it. here goes nothing.)

The room Warren finds himself standing in is one he knows he’s never set foot in before, but something about it still feels familiar to him and he can’t—and, frankly, won’t with everything else happening—place why.

It looks like something you’d see in movies about bands of kids playing at being a secret operative unit housed in a reinforced steel base that, in reality, was nothing more than a treehouse in the backyard of the self-proclaimed leader’s house. It’s oddly normal, almost comforting in its definability, and Warren immediately wonders if that isn’t the ploy of it in the first place. There’s a table with makeup scattered on it and a red plaid jacket identical to something he knows he’d seen Max wearing before thrown on another. Light streams from a window that seems almost unreal in its clarity and a headdress not unlike something you’d see in a stage play sits in a far corner just below it.

Altogether, it all just seem so … _normal_ to Warren.

The only thing that really strikes Warren as particularly odd about the dwelling—you know, despite the fact it was housing a _dead girl_ , but he’ll get to that part later—is the walls. It’s not a particularly large area of space, but nearly every inch of available wall that Warren can see is plastered with clusters of photographs, seemingly at first without rhyme or reason. Pictures of—is that _Chloe_? And _Max_?

In the short few seconds Warren gives himself to look over the area as he (well—partially, because this really isn’t the weirdest thing to have happened to him at this point) feigns total disbelief, _that’s_ what catches him. That, and the fact the walls—from what he can even see—seem almost … blurry, and he really hopes that doesn’t mean he damaged something in his head. But he’ll have to worry about that later, because Rachel is clearing her throat, and, really, _she_ was the weirdest thing about this room in any sense of the statement.

“I feel like I should say something sinister but also really hot right now,” Rachel says from where she sits on the couch, not having moved at all in the time Warren had been in her presence despite the fact he had basically just manifested from God-knows-where and face-planted right onto her floor. “You know, like,” her voice drops to a mockingly sultry tone, “’ _Hello_ there, Warren, I’ve been waiting _so_ long to finally meet you. And you’ve been _so_ —' ugh. Okay, no, that creeped even me out. Forget that shit.” She sighs, crossing her legs and leaning forward to perch an elbow on one. “Maybe, instead, I should just start with a big ol’ fucking sorry, huh?”

Warren stares at her. He wants to say something, but at the same time his brain is still buzzing with all the things he’d just flashed through, and he was half-waiting for it all to flip over again before he could get a word in edgewise. After a moment, Rachel sits back again.

“You’re wondering why you’re even here, right? And why all of _that_ shit”—she waves her hand vaguely— “just happened?”

Again, Warren doesn’t answer, but this time it’s because he’s waiting for her to continue. She catches on almost immediately and continues without prompt.

“So, yeah. This loop? The obviously-fucked-up rabbit hole that you just tumbled your ass down, Alice-in-Wonderland-style? Yeah. Didn’t mean to cause this one,” Rachel admits, turning sheepish as the admittance comes forth and twisting her fingers together in her lap. She doesn’t look directly at Warren, but Warren’s kind of glad for that right in this moment, because he knows he looks gross and half-cracked, chest still faintly heaving from the running and panicking and sweating he’d been doing just minutes before.

“You—” Warren rasps, the first thing he’s said at all, and then stops and presses his palm to his chest, tipping his head back and taking a large breath. God, he was so out of shape.

“Take your time,” Rachel tells him, her voice just as sassy and smooth as Warren imagined someone like her would have.

Warren takes a few more deep breaths before ending with a small one, which he huffs out like a sigh. “You were the one sending me back all this time?”

“Not entirely intentionally.” Rachel leans back on the couch, lifting her still-intertwined hands to slide behind her head. She gives the ceiling a thoughtful look. “It’s hard being dead, you know?” she tells him conversationally, like he had any experience actually being dead, then continues on like he had any actual understanding of what had happened to her—despite apparently being aware Warren didn’t even know what had happened to himself, if her wording was anything to go on, “And then the whole ‘I can change this’ thing that happened when Chloe and Nathan kept dying? And the bay getting wrecked and everything, that shit too. I made _so_ many mistakes.” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t really get all the deets, which is probably why I royally fucked up hard enough to throw two people into the time rewind at once. But, you know. Give a dead girl a reason to keep her friends alive and she has no reason to say no.”

That, without even hesitating to himself, Warren can’t help but agree with. He doesn’t voice this, but he does offer her a nod, which she manages to catch by actually looking at him for the first time. She nods back, then gestures to the couch with the point of one bent elbow.

“Take a seat, mi amigo. We’ll get to those fun treasures behind you once I get some groundwork slapped down.”

Warren does, only glancing once, uselessly, at the photos behind him before doing so. It takes him a few stumbled steps to get into motion at first, and he reaches the couch in fewer strides than he expected to based on the relative distance, but he gets to the side of it and sits down gingerly onto the cushions as far from Rachel herself as he can. It’s not an unconscious move, the distance, and Warren makes no attempt to hide it.

“You don’t trust me,” Rachel accuses him straightaway, though she sounds like she’s more amused than anything.

“I just want answers,” Warren replies simply. Wearily. All he’s ever really wanted in the end was answers, though the whole keeping everyone alive along the way had ended up taking precedence over that initial want. He’s spent so long thinking he’d never get any, though, that this moment to him feels even more unreal than the moments he’d walked through just before. He’s not sure how to process it. “And, okay, fine. You’re kind of freaking me out by telling me _you_ did all of this,” he admits. “I never really thought the source could have been someone I didn’t know.”

“You thought it would throw back to science.”

 “That’s kind of in my nature. Everything has a reason, and that reason has science to back it up. There are no exceptions.”

“Except me,” Rachel says without missing a beat.

Warren winces. “I don’t know,” he admits slowly, more out of pure stubbornness than anything.

“That scares you,” Rachel continues bluntly. “ _I_ scare you.”

Warren _really_ wants to have a good reason to reject that statement, but the epic tongue-fumble he goes though in his attempt to do so ends up working against him, and he gets not a single coherent word out. It’s, frankly, pretty pathetic, and Warren can hear Nathan’s acidic tease in the back of his mind in response.

Rachel purses her lips. “I’m the reason everyone you love is still breathing and comfortable in their own bedrooms, you know. I’m also the reason some of those people mean anything to you in the first place.”

Yeah, Warren can’t argue with that. And they’re both aware of that without a doubt, but …

“You’re the reason,” Warren starts, then hesitates with his mouth open around an allegation he doesn’t actually want to voice. Because she _was_ the reason _he_ wasn’t the same, but Warren didn’t really blame her, and he couldn’t throw something like that in her face when he didn’t mean it. He had changed, but even _that_ —that bitter sort of accusing that wanted to come forth—wasn’t him. He closes his mouth as it dies on his lips without anything at the ready to replace it.

“I _am_ really fucking sorry,” says Rachel, breaking an uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them where Warren hadn’t continued on. “I didn’t understand what would happen.” She stops, then shakes her head once, looking annoyed. “No, that’s kind of actual bullshit. I didn’t understand, yeah, but I also didn’t think to care. There was so much going on, you know? I was a shitty god to you guys. I feel like I belong in a bad Greek epic at this point.”

Warren snorts, and instantly some of the tension in the room lessens. “I guess even gods have to learn from their mistakes.”

“You wanna tell Zeus that one or should I? I guess it’s too late now that he’s stuck his dick in everything, but there could be a second coming.” Rachel mimes hitting a set of drums as she sings out, “Badum-tsh.”

At that Warren has to bark a laugh, and in turn Rachel gives him a wicked smile in a quick flash that he nearly misses. He hasn’t pulled back from his surprise mirth before Rachel’s back on topic again, the relief the laughing gives him too much to pull away from and sober up right in that moment.

“You want answers,” she says.

“I want as much information as you can possibly give me,” Warren agrees once he’s regained control of himself, the heel of his hand scrubbing up the length of his face. His chest still feels like there’s a knot twisted within it, but something tells him that one wouldn’t—couldn’t—be undone until he was back.

If he can get back at all.

“There are a lot of things I probably can’t tell you,” Rachel admits with a sigh, pulling Warren’s attention away before he can fall in that deep trench of thought. Warren blinks at her in surprise.

“Like, physically? Like a spirit block or something?” Were there rules to controlling things like this? Like a Prime Directive or a policy or a—

“What?” Rachel says, glancing over at Warren and snorting, thoroughly breaking his train of thought. “No. I just don’t know how to. Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’m suddenly all-knowing or whatever. There’s no school or lessons or any sort of guide to this shit. I have no idea why some of the things that happened, happened. I basically went with the flow and tried to do what I could to help you two make it right.”

 _Great_ , Warren thinks. Just more things he couldn’t get answers for.

“What happened this time, then?” he tries, because at least there should be an answer for that, right? “Why am I here? Why did I just get to watch people die and get shot by my best friend? I didn’t even get a full day, it all just … sped through and dumped me in places.”

Rachel turns sheepish again, flashing him all of her teeth in a wince of a smile. “Ah, residual. I kind of got angry when I failed my first time and put a little too much oomph into it when I turned to you, and when you figured things out faster than I thought you would I couldn’t pull back on the breaks fast enough. I mean, I did for a hot minute there, but obviously I didn’t totally manage. And now …” she trails off, spreading her hands wide in a gesture meant to mean “here you are”.

Yeah. Here he was.

She got frustrated with her results, and Warren had dealt with those consequences.

Warren can picture it, too. Somehow, despite never having known this girl by more than her name and her associations, he can easily visualize her losing her temper when her first attempt had ended in a way that she hadn’t wanted it to; getting only angrier when yet another loop had ended with the accursed cyclone destroying Arcadia Bay and the poor souls stuck in it.

He can see her throwing herself against the couch and slumping into the cushions, her expression fierce and determined as she flipped time over again and again, setting everything back to the point she knew would be where everything needed to change in order for everyone to be saved. Where she knew everything had to turn, where she watched as once again Warren jolted awake in his bed and resigned himself to doing everything all over again without ever knowing it there really was an end to be gained.

He can see it, and he can almost, _almost_ feel her fury. Like a tickling along the line of his spine, as if she were forcing her anger through him when he couldn’t make things work. Her triumph when he finally managed to get everything to click into place, just like she wanted after all this time. For a moment, he almost thinks it’ll overcome him—but it doesn’t, and the feeling is gone as if he’d only ever imagined it at all.

Warren sighs, pressing his hands to his face and pushing the confusion away. He feels Rachel shift on the couch, which is weird, because she’s dead. Did that mean Warren was dead, too?

“I’m way worse at handling this time stuff dead,” she muses quietly, like she’d read his mind and was abashed over what he had thought about her.

Warren blinks, dropping his hands. “You could control time too? Is that why you can do it now, like this?”

“Me?” Rachel repeats, pointing at herself with one painted fingernail. “Hell no. I died, kid. For realsies. I didn’t have shit to do with time until after I kicked the bucket and got access to this spirit stuff. Still no answers for it,” she says sharply, pushing her finger up in Warren’s face when he tries to open his mouth and ask another question, “so don’t. I don’t get why I can do all this stuff. I just do it. Maybe this was my purpose all along and I didn’t find out until I was cold in the ground.”

That gets Warren to wince. She really didn’t use any gloves when handling her own death.

“Time is weird,” Rachel explains, despite knowing Warren had figured that out long ago. Warren fights from making a snarky comment that didn’t need to be said, but something must have shown on his face as he does, because Rachel winks at him before continuing, “I know, preaching to the choir. But I couldn’t do any of this before I did die, and fuck if I get why I couldn’t.”

So that was just something Warren wasn’t going to get answers on. It was disappointing, to say the least. Extremely, so, actually, but he knows he has to ignore that inkling of want to try and work it out with her if he wanted any other questions. He didn’t trust himself not to hyper-focus on this one subject and potentially lose his chance at anything else.

So, he moves on.

“Who was the old woman?” Warren tries next, because he hadn’t once seen her in the loop he’d just been thrown though.

“Wow, rude comment much? She’s not _that_ old,” Rachel accuses, knocking her elbow against him enough that he jostles against the armrest. “She was an accident, I don’t know what the hell I did there, but she knew what was going on. She wasn’t supposed to be in the bay, but my whole shebang brought her here and got her killed with everyone else. Turns out some people are more attuned to this crap than others, even if they don’t realize it.”

“So,” Warren tries, “she didn’t show up in my last loop because the storm hadn’t pulled her there?”

“Probably,” Rachel says with a shrug, and her ignorance to the subject becomes apparent once again. Warren fights an exasperated sigh—he had to get what he could, right?

“But I didn’t see her in the weird loop I just went through either,” Warren points out. “And the storm came in that one, didn’t it?”

Rachel just looks at him. “Did you end up at the diner at all?”

“Well, yeah—”

“ _Outside_ the diner?” Rachel interrupts.

“… No.” He’d only been in the diner, and that had only been for a split second.

Rachel nods once, leaning back again. “Then there you have it.”

“But—” Warren starts but doesn’t continue, and then is surprised when Rachel makes no move to interrupt him and force him move on like he’d been expecting her to. In fact, she’s actually looking at him expectantly as if waiting for him to finish. “But,” he tries again, “she was in Nathan’s photo. He had a picture of her in his portfolio,” Warren explains when Rachel’s mouth turns immediately to a deep frown. “How is that possible?”

Rachel continues to frown at him for a long moment before slowly turning her head to look at her walls of pictures. The distorted horn that still hasn’t left the confines of Warren’s ear reaches a new level of loud as she does, and Warren scrubs the heel of his hand over that side of his head like it would actually do anything. He almost doesn’t hear her when she mutters, “I always thought there was something fucking weird about that guy.”

Warren’s heartrate spikes just once. “What do you mean?” he asks, trying not to sound _too_ eager.

Rachel’s gaze flickers back to him out of the corner of her eye and he knows he failed at the attempt of indifference. She doesn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, her gaze flicks back again. “I think it was my fault, actually. I jumped around a lot in the different timestreams when I could, to try and push Max in the right direction. That, or …” she trails off, looking suddenly distant and confused. When she doesn’t continue again, Warren debates breaking her out of it, but she sighs heavily before he can stop arguing with himself on whether or not that was a polite thing to do to a dead person. “Photography is strange, the way it disrupts time by capturing it. At least, that’s what I think is the connection. He might have just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch a second when the loop slipped. He didn’t see it happening, but if you had been there, you would have.”

Understanding, great and full of relief as it was, fills Warren’s consciousness all at once, and he goes both hot and cold as he stops breathing completely with the feeling of it all.

 _That’s_ what he’d seen. The whales, the wrecked diner. Kate.

Slips in the loop—warnings he was breaking through, that Rachel had lost control of her abrupt, grinding halt. Of course.

“Of _course_!” he echoes to himself, quietly, his shell-shocked eyes glued to his shoes as he processes it all.

“Eureka,” Rachel whispers back. Warren can hear the smile he knows she has on. He doesn’t know if she understands what exactly he’s nerding out over right in that second, but he doesn’t really care. Because “eureka” is right.

“Holy _shit_ ,” he offers.

“Told you I couldn’t give you all the answers, but I can at least give you some bitching good ones.”

Warren scrubs his hands through his hair, his mind a twisting storm of things he couldn’t pick apart into concise emotions and thoughts, and, for a few moments, he just lets it all sink in. Rachel makes no move to disturb him as he does. When he drops his hands again, she’s watching him curiously. Gauging him, if the look in her eyes is a good indication.

“Wanna see something cool I can do?” she asks suddenly, and before Warren can tell her _everything_ she’s done so far is cool, she snaps her fingers and Warren feels his heart drop straight to his stomach in response. His hands latch onto the couch instinctively and he gasps, feeling as if he’d just taken a quick spin on one of those rides at the theme parks that drop you too many stories to be comfortable. But he doesn’t get a chance to wonder what the hell that had been, because he’s no longer in the hideout area.

He’s … on the _beach_?

“Awesome, right?” Rachel’s voice, tinged with excitement, breaks into Warren’s cloud of confusion. She’s still sitting next to him—and they’re both still sitting on the couch, but, somehow, they also still seem to be nestled in the sand a few yards from the shoreline. He looks over at her and blinks his astonishment, and she nods her head to direct him in the other direction. Warren turns his head quickly, and then nearly startles out of his skin when Nathan is standing right beside him, looking out into the ocean and completely unaware of the two other occupants sitting on some living room furniture right next to him. He’s got his hands fisted in the pockets of his jacket and a determined look on his face, but then he turns suddenly, and it melts immediately into one of annoyance.

“Hey,” he calls, stooping down to grab a handful of sand, “stop sucking face over there!”

“This is when the snow comes,” Warren mutters, watching Nathan launch the sand in the direction of what he knows is Max and himself without having to look.

“Yup,” Rachel agrees, then snaps her fingers again, and they’re back in the hideout as if they’d never left. Behind the feeling of having swallowed his own tongue, Warren feels a twinge of disappointment at not staying in it for longer. For a second, he wonders if it’s hard for her to do. “No point in reliving that beautiful moment again,” Rachel says, pulling Warren back to her presence, “but I can tell you I was pretty pissed when that white shit started sprinkling down.”

“So you saw it all happening,” Warren says, less a question than a statement.

Rachel gives him a wicked grin. “I saw everything,” she says slyly, then sweeps her arm out in a gesture that nearly knocks Warren in the face. “How do you think I managed to get all these beautiful moments?”

Warren, after wincing away from her outstretched arm, turns his attention onto the walls and the mess of photos that plastered them. So that’s what they were—frozen moments from all the times she’d witnessed. Possibly a way for her to keep track of things, Warren assumes, which he immediately finds is an impressive way of mapping time out.

“I collected a lot of really good ones,” Rachel tells him proudly. “Working with Max gave me plenty of moments to pick from. Photographers really know how to pick their instant. I caught them better when I didn’t do my spirit animal schtick, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

She’d guided Max as a spirit in the form of a deer. Judging by her appreciation for Max’s craft, Warren wonders why she’d never shown herself to Nathan.

Which also reminded Warren: “Hey, why didn’t you ever show up for me? You had me doing a lot more hands-on shit than I was equipped for. I could have used a little help.”

The look Rachel gives him is pure amusement. “You? Show up as a ghost creature to you and expect you to focus on saving everyone instead of sticking your nose somewhere I didn’t need you to and wasting time we didn’t have?”

Okay, she had a good point there. Warren says as much, and she gives him a self-satisfied nod in return.

“Exactly. I needed your big-ass brain focused on the Nathan project. Max didn’t question me when I showed up, so I could help her. _You_ are just too damn nosy.”

“Some people call that curiosity,” Warren mumbles, and the air fills with Rachel’s laughter. Warren finds himself enjoying the sound of it too much to interrupt it, so he lets her wind down from it on her own.

“It’s weird,” Rachel muses once she subsides, her eyes roaming up and down Warren when he turns his attention back to her again, “I’m so used to seeing you in those weeks before you turned seventeen that seeing you now is like seeing someone in school after a summer break where puberty attacked.”

And it is in that moment, as Warren was instinctively looking down at his hands as if they would be changed from what he’d already seen, that he realizes he had not seen his reflection even once since he’d fallen asleep back in Nathan’s room.

“What?” he finally says, looking up at her. “Do I ... look different?”

“Time doesn’t actually exist,” she says with a shrug. “So, I guess by default I still live in a timeframe I last remember. Which means, for me, you’re about six months from being a legal adult.” She smirks when Warren’s hands fly to his face as he gives her an alarmed look. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing drastic. You’re still totally rocking that cute nerd look.”

“But I look different,” Warren asks, unable to keep the search for a definitive answer out of his tone. “Older?” he tacks on hopefully.

Rachel snickers. “You look older. Not a whole lot, but I’d say you’re started to grow into yourself.”

Warren has _no_ idea what that means, but he takes it. He does really wish she had a mirror in here, though, if only so he could get an idea of what he was going to look like in six or so months.

“All right,” Rachel says, and pushes Warren’s hands back into his lap. “You’ll make it to eighteen eventually and you can ogle yourself all you want when you get there. Get up and give my masterpiece a looksie. I worked hard on that thing and someone should appreciate it.”

Given no choice but to get to his feet and does as he’s told, Warren surveys his choice of the three plastered walls before him before deciding to start in a counter-clockwise fashion and turning first to his right, where the smaller, scattered sections of photos first seemed to be. It only takes a second of scrutinizing the collections from afar for him to recognize that they all were divided for a reason. What that reason was, he didn’t know yet, but it doesn’t take him very long to figure that out, either.

They were divided based on who they were for.

As he moves onto the very first group of pictures edging the end of the wall, the first thing he sees is a grayscale photo of the dormitories, taken on a day when the rain was heavy, and it ignites such a sharp feeling of dread in his gut that he has to turn away from it before he can even get a really good look. He scans over a few more from what seems to be the same setting and coloration, all with Kate looking down or away with increasingly darkening expressions, before he hits a small cluster of colored ones. In the colored ones still are Kate, but in each one of these, she’s smiling.

 _The colored ones are the outcomes Rachel wanted_ , Warren guesses as he zeroes in on a specific photo featuring himself next to Kate. In the photo she’s laughing in her Halloween costume, looking vibrant and alive and so, so different from the girl in the photos that collage the wall beneath it that, for a split second, Warren understands, on a level he can’t maintain, why Rachel did what she did. As if, for that spare fraction of a beat, Warren was Rachel, and he understood everything Rachel had done.

Once again, her anger flashes in his mind, and he can see her slamming fists against the walls plastered with the photos that only continued to increase in number, cherry-picked moments he hadn’t known he’d lived though at some point and others he could never hope to forget. He can _feel_ her irritation, and now he wonders if this wasn’t the first time he’d felt her emotions channeled through him. The feeling fades almost as fast as it had come on, but a ghost of the anger haunts the back of Warren’s mind.

Warren glances back at Rachel, still moving slowly along the wall without looking at the photos he passed. “Why are some of these so big?” he asks more as a distraction from his own thoughts than because he wants an answer.

“I needed a lot of material. Things were so hard to keep track of with you,” Rachel muses, tilting her head until her blue feather earring lay against the curve of her neck. “You had so much more to work with than Max that I had trouble keeping it together a lot of the time. It all got together once you had Chloe and Max, but if I had waited that long Nathan would have been gone. I had to help you orchestrate it to pick him up immediately and keep things from ruining themselves before they had a chance to actually start.”

“The butterfly effect,” Warren mumbles to himself, but Rachel must hear him easily, because she cracks a smile without turning to face him.

“Chloe and Nathan were the stable elements. Their outcomes all depended solely on you and Max. You and Max changing things sent everything haywire, and little things made big impacts you didn’t see, because they happened after you’d already moved on from them.”

“Like what?” Warren asks despite himself.

“Like Nathan dying. He always dies,” she asserts, and Warren feels his expression fall before he can think to reign it in. Rachel doesn’t seem to notice. “But the way he dies depends. Sometimes it’s Jefferson and sometimes it’s the storm. There was a time he lived, one that you had no control over,” she tells him quickly, giving him a pointed look to shut down the face Warren knows he’d made, looking too interested in that one, maybe a little guilty. “He lives, but he gets convicted with a murder.”

She raises a finger, gesturing Warren back to the wall, and he turns to give it a quick scan to locate the photo that Rachel was pointing out for him. It was easily spotted in its colored form among all the other colorless ones, but the scene he sees does nothing but confuse him. It’s of Nathan, Chloe, and … Max?

Right. He hadn’t been in control, so this must be one of the things Max had controlled. But he didn’t remember this happening—and Nathan had never mentioned—

“This was one of the things I fixed,” Warren says more than asks, taking in the picture of what he’s pretty sure is the school bathrooms (though, judging by the graffiti, it didn’t look like the boy’s, but he doesn’t want to really bother pondering that particular detail right now), with Chloe cowering against the tile of the walls by the door with her hands out and Nathan waving that damn gun around. Max’s head pokes out from the stall at the very end, looking horrified at the scene, and Warren can’t exactly blame her. His voice is dry, almost bitter, when he asks, “Who did he shoot? Or did he shoot himself by accident and get arrested for having a firearm on school grounds and assaulting students with it?”

“Chloe isn’t a student,” Rachel corrects, sounding too casual about it all. Then, she sighs, and Warren hears her stand up. In a few strides, she’s behind him and pressing her hand over the one he has splayed half-across the photo, the figures of Nathan and Chloe peeking out from the curve where his thumb met his palm, and the colors turn so vibrant at her touch that it nearly hurts to look at. “Nathan had a lot of issues, Warren.”

“Has,” Warren corrects, because Nathan still had a multitude of things that gave him no chance to rest and move on. It was why he still didn’t sleep much at night and partied with the cocktail of drugs Warren had only once successfully convinced him not to partake in. It was why he was jumpier than just what his medication made him, why he startled at things no one else did and kept himself busy so he never stood too still. It was why he still needed help, even though he was always so reluctant to admit it.

That didn’t make his apparent problem of _shooting people_ okay, though.

Rachel gives him a look that’s all eyebrow expression, which Warren can see from the corner of his eye easily enough. She shifts out of his peripheral then, taking just half a step back as her hand falls from his. The photo slowly loses its color, returning to the black and white grayscale it had been before and blending easily in with the other photos around it.

“There were always a few different outcomes,” Rachel says behind him as his eyes scan over the different photos. “Nathan accidentally kills Chloe in Max’s loop, and it utterly fucks up everything up in ways I didn’t even catch onto when I chose that moment to flip her switch.”

Warren blinks in surprise, turning his head to look at Rachel. “That was the moment? Really?”

Rachel gives a semblance of a shrug with her head and one shoulder. “A lot would have happened right in that moment. Chloe could have died, Nathan could have gotten convicted for manslaughter. Jefferson could have gotten away with offing me.” Her lips quirk again, and Warren decides she just really likes being expressive when she talks. She wasn’t _deliberately_ being so attractive in her movements even when talking about her own death. “It was a big moment, with a lot riding on it. Don’t ask me exactly how I knew that, because hell if I could explain it even if I did, but I knew. And I made my move. And then I realized I failed, and _you_ came in.”

She winks at him and flips her hair as she twists away.

“The party don’t start,” Warren whispers back in the mock of a sing-song once she’s turned, but Rachel’s already moved on and ignores him. Another thought continues to jingle around in his head, but he doesn’t voice it. He doesn’t want to give it more thought, not with Rachel there to possibly tell him things he didn’t want to know yet.

Manslaughter. The fact it was tried as an accident not lost on him, though he has no doubt that there was something more to it for it to be tried as an act without malice when Nathan clearly was assaulting Chloe in the picture.

And yet it would supposedly be so easy for Jefferson to have framed him for actual murder, and Warren could easily guess exactly why.

It burns bitterly in the back of Warren’s throat, knowing what other people didn’t care to know about Nathan, and he lets it sting as he turns back to the photos again.

Next, there’s Nathan’s room with Chloe on the bed, one foot kicking out and inches away from making contact with the light that Warren thinks she’d intentionally been aiming at.

“I know what that looked like,” says Rachel, and Warren starts almost guiltily, ripping his eyes away from the photo. “It’s not what you think was happening. They both used sex as a guise for what they really wanted.”

“ _Teenagers_ ,” Warren says with more bitterness than he means to. Despite not wanting to know what it was Nathan had actually wanted out of Chloe in that scenario, Warren can guess far too easily what he assumes to be the truth.

“Hey, don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it,” Rachel responds coolly. Warren’s face flares briefly at being called a virgin, but he does his best to ignore it.

“Tricking people into thinking I want them when in reality they don’t have any idea what I’m really trying to do?” Warren offers back. “Not my style.”

Rachel hesitates before she speaks, “Touché.”

Warren’s frustration doesn’t wane, and when he looks at the photo again, he only feels it burn deeper. He loathed the person Nathan had been, but he hated the people who had made him that way even more.

“He shot me,” Warren mumbles, trailing a finger down Chloe, like he could save her from the scene just by blotting her out of the picture.

“Pretty sure didn’t mean to,” Rachel replies easily, then shrugs when Warren looks at her. “He panicked. Finger went to the wrong place and it was too late to fix it by the time he realized. You should have seen how he looked after. People who mean to kill don’t react like he did.”

 _You would know_ , Warren thinks, then thanks no one in particular that he hadn’t said that aloud. When did he turn into such a colossal asshole? He decidedly moves onto the next set of pictures before he can say something he really doesn’t want to.

His fingers brush against a photo plastered in the space between the two collages of what he thinks are of Max and Chloe as he passes by, but he can’t quite make sense of it when he stops to actually look at it.

It’s of Chloe and Max in Chloe’s truck, looking solemnly out the window. A landscape of destruction expands out the other side of the car, and it looks suspiciously like the bay after the storm had hit. But that couldn’t be right, because that would mean—

“The left. After the storm hit, they left town and didn’t look back.”

Warren tries not to let that sting, but he knows he doesn’t quite manage the feat as he’s turning his attention away to the next cluster of photos—which is far smaller than any of the others and just barely edges Max’s section.

Warren frowns, the purple-haired occupant registering to him as someone he knows well. “Why do you have one for Alyssa?” he asks, peering in on a grayscale photo of her standing in the one of the dorm hallways. Seemingly an innocent moment, but Warren knew better than to assume that about any of these pictures. “I didn’t do anything for her.” At least, not that he remembered.

He hears something shift behind him, but he doesn’t turn to check what it is Rachel’s doing as she says, “Oh, she was Max’s.”

“Oh,” Warren says, a little disappointed at the anticlimactic answer. “She was in danger?”

“Everyone was in danger,” Rachel reminds him. “No one was exempt from some flavor of shitty end-all in this stupid game of life we played.”

“Right. Yeah. Whole reason I was playing time-master.”

“Exactly.”

Warren suppresses the need to sigh as he continues looking over the few moments of Alyssa, almost all in relatively normal areas of Arcadia Bay, and all in grayscale save for one of her sitting in a class looking bored. That had been her ending—mundane student in a relatively mundane existence. Warren’s surprised to find he doesn’t envy her quite as much as he probably should, given his circumstances, and he declares that as another of his less-than-sane brain manifestations. He wouldn’t have picked _this_ mess to be stuck in over a normal student life if he had been given the choice.

… Would he have?

No, that’s not something he should waste time thinking over right now, Warren decides as he moves along another cluster of photos that are very clearly of Trevor. Maybe time didn’t exist like he knew it in … _wherever_ he was, but he had learned not to test things too drastically when he didn’t know the outcome. Especially not when he still wanted answers for things.

Trevor’s cluster is even smaller than Alyssa’s, peppered with moments Warren can’t find himself able to recall in that second, and Warren almost wonders if maybe he hadn’t been the one to control Trevor’s outcome like he’d initially thought. But Warren pushes that wonder aside unintentionally when he reaches the third wall, where the two largest of the collages are meshed together in a wide spread of a mess—the first of which is very obviously Nathan’s, if the first picture, which features Jefferson and Victoria, is any proof to go by. Very few of Nathan’s photos offer anything by way of color, and each sparse photo is a dot in a sea of black, white, and gray moments that Warren finds his heart stuttering over when his eyes catch them.

Nathan’s red jacket flares bright in a few spots, attracting Warren’s gaze before he can realize he’s doing it, and he has to stop himself from straying towards pictures he knows he doesn’t want to see, thanking for the small blessing of them being in a scale of color that didn’t give too much to the story. Nathan’s collage was a mess of mistakes and fixed lines, and Warren couldn’t decide if he was happy about the lack of color or frustrated he’d failed enough times for there to be so much.

But then there’s Warren’s, and every single photo of his is in full color.

His is the largest of all of them, with dozens of photos coating the section of wall he was granted. Pictures of him in class, of him crouched over his computer during one of the many times he’d tried to research his way out. Of him at the diner with Nathan and of the four of them that one time they’d gone swimming in the school pool together. There’s one of him holding his head in bed, though he can’t remember exactly which time it’s from, and then there’s one of him and—

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“You kept this?” Warren splutters, pointing at the photo accusingly. In it, Warren and Nathan are down to their underwear and pressed together in the dark corner of a shower stall, caught specifically in the moment when Warren had made eye contact with the curve of Nathan’s jaw. Nathan, on the other hand, looks ready for a fight. Like he had been planning on beating up the guards if they had found him and Warren, and he was just waiting for the perfect moment to spring, whole body coiled with a tension Warren had been too distracted to notice at the time.

He looks so unlike the scowling, hunched-over kid Warren was so used to seeing that he can’t seem to stop staring at the picture, and at Nathan specifically.

 _Guess he wasn’t as confident in his hiding space as he seemed_ , Warren thinks as he actively resists the urge to tear the photo down and hide it somewhere no one could find it. He settles for pressing a palm to his heated face instead, if only so he could stop eyeing up the half-naked form of his friend that he so distinctly remembers being unfortunately stuck against.

“Of course I did,” Rachel chimes in. “That was one of the first times you two worked together without bitching about it first. You were a team, it was photo-worthy.”

Warren scrubs a hand over the back of his neck, unconvinced. “Couldn’t it have been after we got out or something?”

“Mm,” she hums, like she’s actually giving the idea thought. Warren knows she’s not. “Nah. I wanted the _exact_ moment.”

“Don’t tell me you also have—” Warren starts, but knows before Rachel even speaks that she does without him even having to look for it.

“That little scare-kiss stunt Nathan pulled on you? Or maybe the actual lip-lock? _Fuck_ yeah, I do. Manifestations of my own creation, why the hell would I opt out of keeping those?”

Warren sighs and decidedly doesn’t look at any photos that were very obviously of Nathan and Warren in too-close of a distance to one another. That, unfortunately, seems to cut out a mass majority of the photos as he scans along them, and for the first time Warren realizes how much time he spends directly by Nathan’s side. He’d never noticed before—it’s always felt natural, to the point where Warren’s pretty sure he would feel weird if he deliberately tried to keep a distance from him. Warren couldn’t even recall when that shift had happened, because, to him right now, it feels as if he had just always been there, despite that very obviously not being the truth.

A spark of panic forms somewhere in Warren’s chest at the realization, but he’s saved from getting too deep in to that thought by Rachel speaking again. This time, though, she doesn’t seem to be on the same wavelength was Warren is, because her tone is sober when her voice touches the air.

“All of those things would have happened if you hadn’t saved them,” she says solemnly, and anything Warren had been thinking previously utterly vanishes from his mind. When he looks at her, she’s got her head resting in her hand, not unlike how she had when he’d first shown up. “We all change, but sometimes we don’t realize we have a choice in who we become. You were the catalyst they all needed, Warren.”

Silence stretches between them, filled with all the things Warren wants to say but doesn’t have the words for, and Rachel watches him with a startling green gaze that never falters.

“Why me?” Warren finally asks, his voice much more quiet and fragile-sounding than he ever really wanted it to be. “Why did you do this to me?”

Rachel’s gaze softens, and she looks away almost guiltily. It only lasts a second before she sighs and looks back again, that smile hinting at one side of her mouth. “You’re the smartest kid at Blackwell,” she starts. Warren tries to protest that he’s _one_ of the smartest kids, but she steamrolls over him as if he hadn’t said anything in the first place. “You’re possibly the most understanding person I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching,” she continues, ticking her points off on her fingers. “You’re close to Max, who’s close to Chloe. That means you could have quick connections. And, most importantly, your room was right across from Nathan’s. It was fate.”

Warren blinks at her. “You picked me because I just happened to be assigned the room across from Nathan?”

“You were also the least threatening option,” she points out. “At least, at the start you are. You’re pretty good at fighting for someone who’s never really done it before, you know.”

“I’m a quick learner,” Warren mumbles, then shakes his head. “So you just ... hoped he’d end up meaning enough to me in the end for me to not give up on him?” Warren asks her, hinting at disbelief but not quite managing to touch down on it.

“Well, maybe not him, but at least the idea of keeping him alive,” Rachel says, that smirk of hers quirking just a little more. “And it was a good bet even if you put it like that. Doesn’t he?”

Warren blinks at her, his mouth opening slightly to speak, then pursing again as he swallows thickly. “Okay, yeah. I care about him a lot, sure. But what if I hadn’t? He’s hard to get along with for most people who aren’t Victoria. I could have easily given up on him just because I didn’t get along with him.”

“But you _didn’t_ give up on him.”

Warren’s lips press tighter. He knows he won’t win this one, but the fact there had been a chance of him _not_ saving Nathan makes his gut churn sourly.

“Nathan is very hard to cope with,” Rachel agrees when Warren doesn’t respond. “And yet you managed to become the second closest person to him just by sticking with him. Your patience isn’t something to fuck around with, _kid_.”

Warren frowns at her emphasis. “You heard that part, too?” he mutters a little sulkily.

She flashes him her teeth. “You get to see a lot when you’re messing with the threads of time.”

“Right, well.” Warren sighs, shaking his head slowly. “What makes you think I mean the same thing to Nathan that he means to me anyway? We’re friends and he keeps an eye on me in his own Nathan way, but ...” Warren trails off, then has the decency to wince.

Rachel’s smile widens. “You’re cute, playing at the obtuse romantic there. You know you mean a lot to him. You see it just like I do. You know him.”

Warren’s face warms, partially because of Rachel’s accusation and partially because of the smile she’s giving him, and he hesitates.

“I know him,” Warren agrees softly, almost begrudgingly, looking away from Rachel until his eyes land on Nathan’s cluster of photos. “Not enough, though. Not yet.”

“Give it time, young Padawan,” Rachel says. Out of the corner of his eye, Warren can see her leaning back again. “Epic romances aren’t made overnight, unless you want some shitty satirical Romeo and Juliet ending.”

Warren cocks his head in her direction despite himself, blatantly ignoring her calling his and Nathan’s relationship a to-be romance. “You knew Romeo and Juliet was satire? Most people throw it around as a romance. Star-crossed lovers and other cheap tropes.”

“I dabbled in theatre before I met my maker,” she tells him smoothly. The headdress he’d seen sitting in the corner flashes in his memory again, but he decides not to ask. Rachel sighs, then waves her hand through the air like she’s swatting something away before standing up and giving him a pat on the shoulder. “All that crap aside—seriously, you were my best bet, Warren. Nathan’s tricky, but you were the best option for this. No one else would have tried so hard to save someone they barely knew—hell, _hated_ , like you did.”

Warren doesn’t know if he wants to be proud of the person he is or annoyed that he had sealed his own fate by being who he was. Rachel hadn’t picked him for her mission because he was smart—not really. She’d picked him because she’d wanted someone who wouldn’t accept an end he couldn’t live with, and, somehow, she’d known that would be him. Being smart hadn’t hurt anything, but his inability to give up even on someone who he originally thought didn’t deserve it had been the thing that had changed him in the end.

“Tell me, Warren,” Rachel starts softly, misunderstanding Warren’s extended silence and pulling him back again. “Do you regret letting Nathan get the closest to you in the end?”

“No,” Warren replies before the question has been fully voiced, and feels his cheeks redden when Rachel raises her eyebrows playfully at the way he’d pretty much cut her off. He clears his throat before continuing. “I mean—he’s an asshole. He’s fucked up, rude as hell, and is always trying to get a rise out of me like I’m some sort of game, but ... I’m— I don’t regret it,” Warren says quietly, speech slowing as he comes to a realization on his own. “I don’t regret any of it. I’d do it all over again if I needed to.”

Without any sort of warning, Rachel snaps her fingers, and Warren’s heart does the sudden-drop thing as the scene instantaneously flashes to the school’s pool during what is obviously a Vortex Club party. It’s hard to tell which when they all always look the same, and Warren’s general lack of caring for pop music keeps him from identifying which it could be any further when a song blasts in his ears like an offering. It’s not until he sees himself behind the makeshift bar talking to Alyssa that he figures it out.

A hand tapping his shoulder tears his gaze from his own sweaty self, and he turns in the direction Rachel is pointing him towards to find Nathan milling just behind them. It’s hard to tell with the flashing lights and the otherwise darkness that surrounds the area, but Warren’s positive he’s staring down past-Warren with a gaze that looks way soberer than it did when he had ambled up to Warren once Alyssa had left.

And, with that, the entire interaction that had happened between them when Nathan had approached clicks into place.

“He’s looking out for me,” Warren continues after a beat where he’d paused completely, mouth still slightly parted with words he didn’t know he was coming to terms with. “When he stares me down, like he’s going to in a few minutes. When we’re at parties or he loses track of me for a while—he’s—” Warren stops again and shakes his head once in disbelief, eyes on the floor and blinking in confusion. “He’s checking to make sure I wasn’t drugged by someone, isn’t he?”

“Took you that long to catch on, Brainiac?” Rachel chimes in, smiling at Warren knowingly when he looks back at her. The world around them booms with music, then is abruptly cut off when it flashes away again. Warren’s right ear rings with the absence of the music, but the left one continues not to hear anything but that distorted horn. “Yeah,” Rachel continues just a little too loudly for the silence that greeted them, “that’s what he’s doing. Your story about Kate being drugged at a party scared the shit out of him. What, you thought he was looking for the words in your eyes or something?”

“No,” Warren protests, trying to keep embarrassment out of his tone but failing. Which is stupid, because he really hadn’t suspected anything like that each time Nathan had done it.

“Those parties were a hellscape for drugs,” she says fondly. “Was pretty fucked up what some of those kids would do to one another. Guess Nathan was afraid someone would target you.”

Warren frowns, giving it a moment. “Because I’m friends with him,” he says, and it’s half of a question.

“Because you mean something to him, and he’s got a lot of enemies,” Rachel agrees.

“But—Victoria. Do people do that to her?”

“That slice of ice bitch? They’d like to try. I’d love to see what Victoria would do to one of them if they did something to her. You don’t mess with Victoria like that and get away with it.”

“But they would me,” Warren finishes, lips pressed into a thin line, “because I’m easy bait.”

“Sorry to be that bearer,” Rachel says, not sounding even a little sorry. “But you have someone looking out for you, at least. More than one someone. You’ve got your own little posse ready to kick any ass that tries to wrong you.”

Warren makes a face. “Yeah. I guess I have you to thank for that one, huh.”

“You love it,” she eggs, and Warren has no choice but to relent to that one with a shrug of acceptance. He wouldn’t trade off his friends, and he knew he was grateful for the protection and acceptance they gave him. He turns again to the walls, looking for just one photo of the three he could easily call his best friends, but none immediately pop out at him from either the mass of gray or the sparse snatches of color, and he doesn’t even try to look through his own.

There were so many photos, and even then, they were only moments in the cycles of time he’d fought to be free of. They were proof of his nightmares, of the hell he had no actual want to ever revisit, but they were also proof of his triumph. They were also proof that he really was done with it all, and what had happened now was only a mistake from a powerful novice that hadn’t really had much of an idea what it was she was even doing.

“All of this,” Warren mutters once he’d given up his search and pushed again away from his thoughts, just loud enough to know he would be heard, and raises his arms to gesture at the walls and the photos all at once. “All of this happened, all to save a single town from some stupid storm that should have never existed in the first place.”

“All of this just to find the right combination of cause and effect. A butterfly flaps its wings, after all,” she replies softly, and something in him twists sharply as the words he’d spoken before clicks into place. The butterfly effect. Newton’s laws of motion.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Energy never simply vanished.

Could that possibly mean that ...?

Oh, god, no.

 _Did you doom another town by saving us?_ is the question that springs right to the tip of Warren’s tongue, but the way Rachel is looking at him causes his tongue to glue firmly to the roof of his mouth before he can even try at accusing her.

Because something in her gaze tells him she’s already thought that herself—and saving Arcadia Bay and everyone in it was worth whatever she might have wrought upon someone else by allowing them all to continue on living. It presses a knife to Warren’s ribs, cold and slick and sharp with building understanding of what he may have had a hand in.

It hurts—that knowledge that there still could be destruction and death to others who deserved it no more than they did when they were in the line of fire. It twists his heart in his chest, flowing guilt and unworthiness though his veins.

He wants to question it; to take the potential catastrophic endgame clause and tear it down to the bare of its bones until it shredded him piece by piece into a flurry of unending dispute and regret.

He wants to know if they were—if he was—worthy of that sacrifice a population of strangers may have made thanks to Warren’s own ministrations.

He wants to understand a definitive truth he knows, deep to his very core, doesn’t actually exist. Because the world doesn’t operate in black and white like so many people wished it did, and he knew this on a level that was far more personal than it ever had the right to be, in the form of a person he would have undoubtedly considered saving no matter the cost if he had to make the choice right here and now.

Everything operated in a spectrum of grays and colors that no one person could ever hope to fully comprehend within the span of time they were given. Not even Warren; not even now, with more time crammed into his past month than any one life had a right to experience.

It scares him—this person he’s become. This chaotic vortex he’s twisted himself into; this unstable judge of lives he didn’t even know. He now would consider saving the people he couldn’t live without over those he couldn’t begin to comprehend the existence of.

It _terrifies_ him.

When had he become so hesitant to refuse an option he probably couldn’t actually fix?

Warren knows, despite the pause this hypothetical situation may have given him, that in the end he wouldn’t allow one person to die over another. Not really, not even for someone he needed, not when he could fight to save everyone if at all possible. But it’s the pause that scares him. It’s the pause that tells him he’ll never be who he was before, and he feels far too young to have that kind of weight settled into his soul.

Rachel knows too—Warren can tell without even looking at her. Rachel knows what she’s done, but, unlike Warren, her hesitation was a final decision, and she never would let it be anything else.

And that was exactly why Warren had been sent back and back and back again. Because Rachel wanted her end, and she was willing to give anything to get it. Even someone she initially had only cared about long enough to use as a pawn for what she wanted.

Warren twists his hands in the hem of his shirt, a moisture welling from the corner of one eye as he struggles to keep his lips pressed over a noise of distress he doesn’t want to make. He feels Rachel shift on her feet next to him, and then her arms are sliding across his back and his chest to encompass him in an embrace that seems far too warm coming from someone who, in essence, wasn’t even flesh and bone anymore.

“It is what it is,” she whispers into his ear. “Life aims to fuck us over at any time it can. We have to be the ones to take control and change it when we can. We have to look out for ourselves first.”

He doesn’t answer her—he can’t. If he did, he was afraid he’d crumble around the monster he felt like inside.

“You understand,” she tells him when he doesn’t say anything, and her tone tells Warren she couldn’t be convinced otherwise. “You understand why I had to do it. Why I had to save them.” She pauses. “Would you be able to live with yourself if you had been the reason he died? Could you live at all?”

 _You’re not even alive!_ Warren wants to scream at her, wants to cry into her face and shake her shoulders with all the frustration he can’t express, but he doesn’t. He won’t. He doesn’t have to ask her who she means. He knows. Because she’s right.

He was a lifeline that could almost become unhealthy if they both were a different kind of people. As they were, that lifeline wasn’t as drastic as it could have been—but Warren still knows she’s right. No one else looked out for Warren; no one else knew what was happening in his head and what he was doing to himself behind the guise of a curtain no one else could see. No one else had been exactly the net he needed to fall into after it had all been said and done and Warren had had to live with the whiplash his victory had left him with. No one else understood the scars he now had to bear. No one else understood the feeling of having seen something everyone else would label insane and move on from without ever once debating if any of it could have been real.

Nathan had been the thing Warren needed at the end of it all, and no one else would have been able to do the same if it hadn’t been him.

And, suddenly, Warren _does_ understand.

He looks down at Rachel, startled, and a slow smile spreads across her face.

She had known exactly what she was doing, choosing Warren to save her friends. Choosing Warren to save Nathan. She had known all along.

“Oh,” is all he says, but it’s the single word that says it all.

She holds him a little longer—for how long exactly, Warren doesn’t know, because there are no clocks in the room and time didn’t even _feel_ right as it (probably) flowed around them—but then she pulls away again, and Warren feels the loss of her unusual warmth more than he’d expected to after only knowing her for as long as he’d been in her domain. Instead of opening the conversation back up again, Rachel takes his hands and guides him back to the couch, and the action feels too much like a distraction to settle well with Warren as he follows her lead. He accepts his seat all the same when she gestures to the couch with a little flourish, but he can’t help but wonder if she was setting him up for something more.

“You haven’t asked me if this is all just a nightmare,” Rachel says once they’re both seated, finally breaking the silence that had encompassed them until now.

Warren glances over at her, then shakes his head just once. “I know it’s not. It’s too vivid—and everything is too streamlined from one thing to another. I’m given time to calculate, to think and react and feel. Nightmares don’t—” Warren hesitates, mouth working at the words he needed silently for a moment before he can continue. “The brain doesn’t work like that. Emotion is the biggest drive there, not logic. I’ve had enough of them to know now when I’m really dreaming. I _don’t_ know what’s happening,” he insists, hands clenching into fists hard enough for his palms to sting, “but it’s not something my brain alone conjured up for me.”

Rachel looks at him for a long moment, eyes centered on his and clear in their calculation. Then, her lips curl up on one side and her head lilts away appreciatively. “You really are one smart kid, aren’t you?”

But Warren looks away, because, in that moment, he can’t stand to look at her. “There are some things you learn from books, and other things you learn by living. Reading never would have taught me that, regardless of what the words might have said.”

“Or being dead,” Rachel points out, gesturing once again to where they were located. “Couldn’t learn this kind of shit in life without being you, but death offers a lot of opportunity.”

“Or being dead,” Warren echoes and, for a second, hopes that he too would have the same kind of learning adventure Rachel had once he had died. He doesn’t hold onto that hope, more because he was only seventeen and had plenty of time for that thought to come around again, but also because he has one thing he can’t hold in any longer.

“Am I stuck here?” Warren finally asks, the question he’d been reluctant to voice all this time in fear of the answer Rachel would give him.

“Only if you want to be.” She gives him a wink, and Warren actively stops his brain from taking that and letting his imagination run with it. “That’s a lie,” she says immediately, “you can’t stay with me. You’re still alive, you don’t really belong here—and no one can be in two places at once anyway. In fact,” Rachel checks a nonexistent watch and, after a moment, sighs and kicks her legs out. “Time’s almost up. You’ve been here too long as it is.”

“What?” Warren asks, startled at the sudden knowledge he had to leave—and sooner than he’d been ready for. “But I have so many more questions.”

“You would. But such is life—can’t solve all the mysteries, can you?”

“Wh—” Warren starts, mind stuttering with all the things he wants to say at once, and then shakes his head. “Hold on. How the hell do I even get out of here?” How the hell did he really get there in the first place was still the question he’d never get an answer to, apparently, but he was slowly accepting that outcome. Maybe he really didn’t need to know—at least, not just yet. Not while he was still alive himself.

It’s so innocent a question that the reaction he gets from Rachel is not one he’d been expecting at all. Rachel’s expression softens, then falls completely, and she looks at Warren sadly. “There’s only one way,” she tells him gently, “and I’m sorry about this.”

Warren frowns at her, a spark of fear bursting to life at the base of his throat, but, before he can say anything in response, she lifts her finger and points to the door.

Warren turns to look at it. It’s just a wooden door, so seemingly innocent, but Warren knows better than to simply trust what he sees. He gulps, then stands and starts towards it, knowing if he didn’t just go for it, he’d spend all the time it took to get there overthinking it. The idea of saying goodbye to Rachel crosses his mind only once, but something about it feels so utterly wrong that he pushes it away again before it can become an action. Rachel doesn’t do goodbyes, that something tells him, and Warren wasn’t going to be the exception. At least, not in the conventional sense.

“Warren,” Rachel calls just before he reaches it, and he twists at the waist almost embarrassingly fast to face her again. Her expression is steely, unyielding, and she looks at him with eyes that seem too hard for her pretty face. “Thank you for saving them,” she says, and Warren’s heart seizes up in response.

“Thank you for letting me,” he, unfortunately, squeaks back, the fear of what was coming too much for his vocal chords to cooperate. So much for a cool-guy-hero sort of departure.

Rachel’s lips quirk, and then she nods, and Warren turns away again and pushes through the door before he can embarrass himself further.

He hears it before he sees it, because the second he steps over the threshold of the little hideout sheets of rain burst to life and threaten to flatten him to the ground in their intensity. Warren stumbles against the onslaught, throwing his arm over his eyes in an attempt to shield them, and the train sings in his ear, mixing almost melodically with the rising horn in his other.

He’s not quite sure where he is until he spots the lighthouse in the distance, and his heart stops cold on his chest.

He’s back at the overlook—the same place he’d visited only once before, with Nathan, in an attempt to make sure he’d fixed everything he needed to in order to break the cycle.

Warren is back at the overlook—and he’s staring down the one thing that had caused his whole life to spiral out of the confines of reality and ultimately lead him to be who he was today.

He’d never seen it before now; never had the chance to face the vortex of devastation that had always cost him—or so he had thought—his life in the end before he had to try again. He’d never had the chance to feel the full incoherence he felt just in this moment, with it facing him and hurtling towards him; to feel the full disbelief that something like this really had existed once upon a time.

Warren looks at the massive cyclone before him with his mouth agape and his breathe locked in his lungs, and, for a single moment, he feels a twinge of relief.

It _really did_ exist.

And now, Warren had to face it down.

His feet slide in the saturated ground as he trudges his way up the side of the overlook, feeling as if he were taking twice as long because of the force of the wind against him, but he doesn’t fall. He continues to push, coughing as his breath is taken from him, and, eventually, he reaches the end. His end. And the moment his feet line up with the edge of the ground, everything suddenly feels right.

This is where he was meant to be—even as the wind howls in his ear and echoes strangely against the singing horn of the other, even as the rain pelted stinging tears from his eyes—this is where Warren had meant to finish. Facing on the monstrosity he’d fought so hard to banish from his time.

Warren stands on the cusp of the cliff, eyes shut tight against the stinging whip of the rain and the wind, tears streaming down his cheeks and a cold numbness spreading all around, and he lets the scream of the train overtake him one last time.

 

* * *

 

When Warren wakes up, it’s with a jolt and a gasp for air, not unlike that first time he’d woken up and found time repeating itself.

When Warren wakes up, it’s with hands clutching the front of his sweat-soaked shirt—hands that don’t belong to him.

When Warren wakes up, it’s to someone calling his name in a panic over and over, trailed intermittently with questions of if he was okay and if he could hear the owner of the voice. If he could breathe.

The fabric of his shirt is gripped deep within the hold of the hands, tight enough that he can feel the half-inch of air between himself and the ground he’s lifted from, and it shakes him with movements that are quickly becoming more frantic. The voice is rough around his name, almost bordering on pleading, and, in an instant, he can tell it belongs to Nathan.

“Graham? Graham, hey. Hey! _Warren_!”

Warren snaps his eyes open, and Nathan’s blurry face is pushed so close to his that all he can make out through the fuzz his vision offers is patches of blue and white and black and pale, pale skin.

“ _Say_ something!”

Warren opens his mouth, but it’s dry enough that he can’t make a sound. He closes his eyes again, then manages a groan, and all at once Nathan vanishes from where Warren could feel him looming. His back touches down to the ground once again and his shirt pools against his chest with loose fabric, and before he can think to come back to himself slowly, it all hits him at once, and instinct forces his whole body to tense up again, rocketing him into a sitting position that sends his head swimming.

“What day is it?” Warren hears himself croak out first, despite the fact it obviously had to be a day in his future where Nathan tolerated him, if Nathan was even here at all. Then words are spilling from his lips in the form of questions he’s not allowing answers to as he readjusts himself to keep his head from throbbing, and he cracks his eyes open again to find Nathan hadn’t actually left his side at all. It’s not until Nathan reaches out and presses his hand to Warren’s mouth that Warren realizes the questions weren’t coherent, and nothing he’d said past the first one had been comprehensible at all.

Warren doesn’t get a chance to try the questions again, because with the hand touching down on his mouth Warren realizes it’s shaking, and he pushes forward on his knees to grab Nathan by the shoulders and pull him in again. The movement is sudden enough that Nathan flinches, his hand slipping, and Warren succeeds in bringing Nathan back to his side before he has the chance to protest or fight it.

“You’re alive,” Warren blurts out. His hand is already smoothing across the front of Nathan’s shirt where he’d once seen a bloom of blood before he knows what it is he’s doing, his mind scrambled and darting every which way with more thoughts than he can process, and Nathan lets him with only a mildly violent look of utter confusion.

“What are you talking about?” Nathan replies, the pleading from before far gone but the hoarseness still coating his words in grit. Not from sleeping, Warren realizes somewhere in the chaos of his waking mind—from crying.

“I—” Warren starts, then hesitates over the rest when the events of the day before springs to the forefront of his memory. But Nathan sees Warren’s pause and grabs the front of Warren’s shirt again, knocking one of the hands from his shoulder, and pushes in close.

“ _Tell_ me,” he hisses, and there’s enough underlying panic to his demand that Warren decides he has to.

“You died,” Warren starts first, because that seemed like the most important thing to tell him right at the start. Nathan flinches again, but Warren continues, knowing Nathan wouldn’t want him to stop there. “Jefferson, he—no. Everyone died—except. Except me and Max and—I don’t—there was a lot of—I don’t know how I—”

Panic rushes up Warren’s throat as the events rush to the forefront of his mind, cutting off the rest of his words effortlessly and completely, and all he has left to offer is a choke of distress that Nathan takes with ease, pulling Warren in close and silently offering something Warren didn’t realize he needed to do.

With a warning hiccup of a gasp, Warren wraps his arms around him and starts crying. Hard. Ugly sobbing and choked noises, right into Nathan’s long-sleeved black shirt. After a few moments Nathan asks first if he needs to call someone, and then if Warren wants him to call Max, and then once more when Warren still doesn’t answer, but Warren can’t stop crying enough to articulate anything.

Around them, the whale song from the night before sings, and somewhere in his mind Warren recognizes it as the noise he was hearing the whole time he’d been stuck in the final loop. He wonders if that means he’d imagined it all, but he can’t focus on the idea enough to question it right now. He’ll have to do that another time.

For now, all he can do is cry out his panic and pain and disbelief, and, after a beat when Nathan lifts his arms up and wraps them around Warren’s back, he knows Nathan is going to let him stay there for as long as he needs and let it out.

And that, Warren will think much later, is when he’s pretty sure he fell in love with Nathan. When he realized that Nathan was so much more than the rich douchesack he’d felt obligated to save all that time ago.

That he was more than just the partner he’d became in the days before the storm and the friend he’d became in the ones after.

That he trusted Nathan, and the idea of going through any more of this alone was unthinkable. Unbearable.

That he wanted Nathan to stay there, with him, and hold him until he could breathe again and crack a bad joke about a scene in a movie that barely related to the situation at hand, because that was how Warren coped with these things. Or, how he used to cope with these things, before the time loops had changed him.

He was in love with Nathan, and he’d understand later what this moment was to him.

But, for now, all he can think of is the storm, and everything it almost took away from him.

Eventually Warren’s crying slows, the ache in his chest that had been wrenching his heart in a fist of terror starts easing, and he breathes in ever-slowing breaths with a calm that grows as the realization that it all was over continues to sink in.

But even after it all calms down, Warren can feel his whole body stiffen again with a tension he can’t release, and Nathan must mistake it as a sign he was going to fall back into crying again, because he does something Warren hadn’t seen coming a mile away. He tries to _soothe_ him.

_Verbally._

“Hey, hey, hey.” Nathan’s voice, husky and rushed as the repeated word ghosts out his lips, is unlike anything Warren’s ever heard him from him before. For a split second, Warren wonders if this wasn’t his timeline that he’d come back to at all. “Warren. Hey. Look at me.”

Warren does. It takes a long moment to actually locate Nathan’s forever-squinted, stubbornly sharp gaze, but Warren manages, and finds Nathan’s blue eyes are almost nothing but fully-blown pupil. _He’s scared_ , Warren comprehends before anything else.

Warren has scared him.

“Nothing was real, Graham. This is real.” Nathan’s hand wraps around Warren’s wrist tightly, pulling his hand up to press against Nathan’s chest. It’s a gesture Warren never would have fathomed coming from someone like Nathan, but Nathan was always proving Warren’s assumptions wrong. “This is all real. Whatever you just came from, it was more time bullshit. Wackjob assfuckery from that messed up brain of yours. It wasn’t real. I’m real. This is your timeline, Warren.”

 _I’m your timeline_ , it sounds like he’s saying, as if he understood without being told what Warren had just gone through. _This me, here._ I  _am real._

Nathan’s heartbeat is erratic from beneath the wrinkled, lived-in shirt he wears, and Warren can feel it thrum beneath his fingertips, rapid and afraid, but solid in its comfort. Warren doesn’t have the heart to tell Nathan that everything felt real and solid in the other ... time, hallucination, vision, whatever it was. That everything felt just as it did here and now.

Instead, he accepts the comfort Nathan is giving him, closing his eyes and breathing in time with the rise and fall of Nathan’s chest beneath his hand, fast and worried but still easier than Warren’s traumatized own.

And, slowly, he relaxes.

His breathing eases to a rhythm he can maintain on his own, his teeth stop clenching themselves to a dental nightmare. His shoulders relax and, in turn, he feels the tension slowly ease out of Nathan from beneath the touch he doesn’t interrupt.

In the form of a slowly-encroaching warmth, he feels Nathan’s forehead coming to press against his before skin contact is even made, and his heart hammers once, then twice, in a way completely unlike the frantic terror it had been fueling just before.

Warren doesn’t dare open his eyes, because he doesn’t want it to end.

“Fuck,” Nathan chokes under his breath after a moment of quiet, voice thick with something Warren can’t name. He’s close enough that his words ghost against Warren’s mouth when he speaks. “You weren’t breathing. I couldn’t wake you up. I thought you were _dead_ , you stupid bitch. Fuck, Warren. _Asshole_. Fuck!”

And just like that, Warren’s Nathan was back, and for a second everything felt right again.

Nathan takes a deep, shuddering breath that Warren can feel beneath his fingertips, and suddenly Warren wants nothing more than to burst back into tears. But something in him stops it from happening. He doesn’t know if it’s shock or fear or a need to keep just calm enough that Nathan doesn’t fall back into a panic, but it keeps him at bay. If only for now—if only while Nathan presses closer and closer in, forehead pressed firmly to his and hands gripping first Warren’s arms and then his shoulders and then the rest of him in a vice-like hold that feels like it’s meant to keep him from slipping away to a place Nathan can’t follow.

“I saw it,” Warren whispers back, the vortex of the storm playing behind his eyelids in a way he knows he’ll never forget. Nathan tenses, and the thumb of Warren’s hand trapped between them taps on Nathan’s chest twice before Warren realizes what he’s doing. “No, no. It’s done. We’re done. It’s all over. I saw it—it’s over. We really won, Nathan.”

Nathan stills. Warren almost thinks he’s going to push away and close up again, but the thought is barely even fleeting as Nathan’s arms slide around him in an honest-to-god hug, initiated all on his own. His head slips from Warren’s, dropping down to press into the space where Warren’s shoulder met his neck, and Warren feels him breathe deeply once, and then over again.

“Tell me,” Nathan mutters after he’d taken a handful of breaths, his words hot against the fabric covering Warren’s skin. It seems, without Warren having to explain anything about it, that Nathan understands what Warren had just awoken from hadn’t been a simple nightmare. That something more had manifested while Warren had slept, and Nathan hadn’t been there to experience it with him. “Tell me what happened.”

And, without hesitation, Warren does.

He starts slow, struggling to remember the parts he couldn’t quite recall before he’d found himself in that hospital room, the event itself feeling as if it had happened months and months ago instead of mere hours—if even that. He’s not actually sure what time it is, and the forever-darkness that was Nathan’s room didn’t help matters, but, in the moment, he can’t be bothered with wondering that.

As he speaks, he tries his best not to manually tip-toe over moments he instinctively knows would either hurt Nathan or be painful to talk about, and he ends up having to stop himself in order to backtrack and right whatever he’d skipped over more than once. Nathan doesn’t question him or interrupt him as he speaks, despite Warren being fully aware the way he was executing the explanation was irritating, and, eventually, he manages to get out as much as he could before he runs out of words.

Throughout the entire thing, Nathan doesn’t move. He keeps his hold on Warren intact and his face pressed firmly into Warren’s shoulder. It’s not until Warren trails off to a stop that he lifts his head at all, one of his hands drifting away from around Warren’s back to press against his own mouth, and he leans back to stare at Warren with that penetrating blue gaze Warren’s certain no one else could ever perfectly replicate.

Warren stares back, because he doesn’t know what else to do. He has nothing else to say, and Nathan doesn’t offer anything himself. His expression is one of war—the one Warren knew too well to be the one that he couldn’t dare interrupt—so he doesn’t. It takes the sound of Nathan’s phone going off for anything to happen at all, and, with a movement that’s too sharp to be anything but a wince, Nathan’s hand drops from his face and he speaks, “Does she hate me?”

The question is so sudden, so innocently asked, that Warren is fully thrown off guard and flounders. “What?”

Nathan doesn’t repeat the question, but his eyes narrow to annoyed slits, lips pressing into a line, and Warren can _hear_ the “don’t be a fucking moron and just answer me” that Nathan doesn’t have to spit at him. Warren shakes his head once, so sharp he almost whips it in the motion, and then again at a pace that doesn’t rattle his brains. Nathan’s hand tightens in the grip Warren realizes he has on the back of Warren’s shirt in turn.

“Nathan,” Warren starts slowly, bringing a hand up to cup the curve of Nathan’s shoulder, “she _saved_ you. I was sent back all those times because _you_ were the one that kept getting his ass k-killed.” Warren pauses, clearing his throat to stop a repeat of the stutter, but Nathan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because nothing about him changes as he waits for Warren to continue. “She doesn’t hate you at all,” Warren says, dropping to a firm whisper. “You think she’s mad you were involved in her murder.”

It’s not a question, and the small tic of the muscle in Nathan’s jaw means it never had the potential to be. Because Warren was right.

Warren sighs, ignoring the sudden glue-like dryness his tongue has become in his mouth. “Listen, okay? I don’t know shit about Rachel—or, I didn’t before … whatever that was that just happened. No idea who the hell she was as a person, or the kind of anger she can hold over things. Nothing! But now? Now that I’ve seen her in the—er. Well, not the flesh and blood, wow that was almost a really shitty way to say that. Actually, I don’t know what she was made of, because she felt real to me even though we know she d— _OW_. What was that for?! I was getting to the point!”

Warren’s hand flies to his forehead to rub what he knows will be a decently-red spot from where Nathan had decided headbutting was the appropriate nonverbal way to get Warren back on track. Nathan only quirks his eyebrow in response, hissing something so low under his breath that Warren can almost pretend it’s just a breath that only sounds suspiciously like “pussy”. All the same, Warren glowers back.

“I met her. I know things I never would have known before. She’s got a temper, right? Really fluid and attractive facial expressions she likes to cycle through as she talks to you? Can flip her hair on a level even Britney Spears wishes she could do?”

Nathan’s other eyebrow raises to meet the first, and he blinks. “Of all the things you could notice about someone, you go for that bullfuck?”

“Shut up,” Warren replies hastily. “I’m right though, right? So trust me when I say she holds nothing over you for that. Or, if she did, she decided saving you was more important than whatever anger she might have had. But I really don’t think she did. I think she blamed Jefferson completely, because it was Jefferson that caused everything. You didn’t _do_ anything, Nathan. You keep blaming yourself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Nathan’s eyes dart away, and Warren can see him closing off. “I helped instigate it. The bunker was—is my family’s. This has my blood smeared all over the ass of the bitch here.”

The image of Nathan dead in the bunker flashes in Warren’s mind, sudden and merciless, and Warren flinches like he’d been hit. Nathan’s head jerks back to Warren in alarm.

“Fuck,” Warren says, uselessly trying to wave Nathan off with his free hand. “Shit. Too fresh. Way too fucking fresh.”

Nathan looks at him with pinched confusion, but it doesn’t take long for it to flip over into a horrified kind of understanding. “I died,” he says curtly, tone flat and completely emotionless.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Warren offers, then shudders on a full-body level. “She doesn’t blame you,” he says after the short tremors had their run. To his credit, Nathan doesn’t look away again.

He doesn’t say anything either, but then, quietly, “She told you that?”

“She didn’t need to. The way she spoke about everything said it for her.”

Nathan doesn’t look comforted by this information even in the slightest, but Warren can tell by the way his grip lessens and a single line disappears from between his eyebrows that he believes Warren. That he trusts Warren’s word even when the situation seemed too insane to have been real at all. His eyes drop for a moment, searing into the carpet they sat on, and when he looks up again, it’s with a gaze filled with an emotion Warren doesn’t have a name for.

“So she ended up being some sort of time-controlling badass,” Nathan says, sounding absolutely impressed with how Rachel’s death went for her.

Abruptly, the whale song cuts off, filling the room with such a pure silence that Warren’s arms immediately break into goosebumps. Then, a chill rushes through the air and Nathan shivers as his lips part around a single name that carries in the quiet around them: “Rachel?”

Nothing happens. Warren looks around the room, searching for any sign of the deer Rachel either liked taking the form of most or could only take the form of, but he can’t find any hint of her at all. He looks back at Nathan again, who’s looking around the room like something’s on fire and he needs to find it, but he’s having no more luck than Warren had.

He’s about to credit the blackout on a power failure when a feeling of soothing comfort fills him, followed by another short burst of chill, and he knows she’s here. Somewhere. He tells as much to Nathan, and Nathan gives him a bewildered look.

“How can you tell?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Warren admits truthfully. “I just can. I think it’s the time connection, because I played puppet for her for such a long time.” Warren stops, shuddering violently when a burst of cold that could put the Arctic Circle to shame slaps him on the base of his spine. Yup, definitely Rachel. “You should probably tell her thanks for saving your ass before she does something to us we’ll regret,” Warren says sheepishly.

After a hesitation, Nathan snorts. “Yeah. Well. Thanks, Rachel. For saving me even if I didn’t really deserve it and all that shit.”

“Hey—” Warren starts but is drowned out when the whale song starts again without warning. Warren finds it ominous, like a bad sign in response to what Nathan had tried to accuse himself of, but, surprisingly, Nathan doesn’t seem to find it that way. One side of his lip is quirked up in a smirk, and his eyes flicker towards the ceiling before returning to Warren again.

“You, too,” Nathan says, then rolls his eyes when Warren looks blankly back at him. “Thanks for saving my life, Graham,” he clarifies. It takes a few more seconds for Warren to process Nathan’s thanks, but when he does, his heart thumps hard yet again, and he has to swallow around a knot that suddenly springs up in his throat.

“Anytime, Prescott,” he responds in a poor mimicry of smooth. Then, quietly but earnestly, he says, “I needed you. I wouldn’t have made it through any of this without you with me.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” is all Nathan says, but it’s all he needs to say. The unspoken “I needed you, too” hangs in the air, crystal clear in the disgruntled expression Nathan has on his face. Despite the internal struggle he seems to go through, Warren knows he won’t say it. And he doesn’t need to, because Warren understands. Warren can see it in the things Nathan does for him, says to him, and he can see it in the way Nathan continues to be simply _Nathan_ for him, even when other people might think they need to change.

They’d needed—still need—each other, and it’s only thanks to a dead girl figuring it out for them that they were able to find each other— _really_ find each other—at all.

And, really, Warren was more than okay with giving her full credit for that.


	10. After

Warren doesn’t go to class the next day. He can’t—this time, he really can’t. He needs a day to compose himself, to recover and recuperate and reestablish the fact he was back. To handle the ever-constant panic of thinking he might return again to the place he had just come from, where everyone he loved was dead, Nathan was broken and gone, and Max and Chloe had fled Arcadia Bay without once looking back.

He can’t blame them. As much as he really, really wants to—he can’t. Because he has no idea what they went through in their time, what things they might have lost and what events might have changed them forever. Changed them like they had changed Warren.

He can’t know, and he doesn’t, and it’s because of this that the fact they left him settles in his gut like a cold stone of recognition. He can’t get rid of it, but he can accept it and move on.

And, so, he does, like he has done with everything else that has happened to him. Warren uses the day he grants himself to go through the motions of crying, panicking, and calming, and then cycling through them all over again once too much time has passed since the last time he did it. And he does it with Nathan by his side.

Nathan, who Warren had told to leave, to go to class and come back again if he wanted to when the day was done. Nathan, who had told Warren to take his suggestion and stick it somewhere lewd, because he wasn’t going to leave Warren’s side this time, and he wasn’t about to let Warren hide things like this from him ever again.

Nathan, who Warren knew, somewhere inside him, still wasn’t okay himself from the events of the day before, no matter how he tried to cover them up with his sharp retorts and glowering looks smothered over snatches of imploring affection that anyone who didn’t know him well enough could have easily missed.

Nathan, who makes Warren’s heart thunder in his chest yet again with his rejection of Warren’s suggestion, and who settles in Warren’s bed beside him without asking before Warren had even left it himself since returning to it that morning after waking up.

Nathan, who methodically coaxes Warren through the morning and the early afternoon with distractions in the form of prompts for discussion on a myriad of topics Warren hadn’t even thought he’d known about. Who knew what got Warren to forget about himself for longer and longer periods of time as the day dragged on, and who finally decided, sometime around three in the afternoon, to dig through Warren’s closet while Warren verbally contrasted the necessity of physical goods in the encroaching presence of the digital age (specifically—in the form of comic books and video games).

When Nathan pulls his mussed-haired head from the contents of the closet, he’s got a sweatshirt clutched in his grip and a puzzled look on his face—from the train of conversation Warren had taken or from whatever had conspired while he’d been neck-deep in the contents of Warren’s entire wardrobe, Warren’s not sure. He trails his leeway into a comparison to a stop all the same, but only because Warren could tell Nathan was about to cut him off anyway to speak, if the slow part of his lips was anything to go by.

Sure enough, Nathan shakes his head once in a small, almost dismissive motion before his mouth fully opens to talk, “The way our batshit species goes through trees puts the whole fully-digital mess on the pedestal of importance, yeah, fine. But we don’t just shit gold and copper and the pure ability to manifest that bullshit out of thin air. Someone has to get that shit, and they need the fuel to get it. We’re not balls deep in the world of alternate energy for there to be that big of a difference yet, right? Still got, like, years before we get there.”

So he _was_ paying attention. “And there is one of the arguments,” Warren offers him with a flourish of his hand through the air, feeling a twinge of pride and mild awe (not that he would ever risk telling Nathan that) at how Nathan had seamlessly kept up and managed to contribute to what Warren had thought would be a one-sided discussion once he got into the nitty gritty. Not for the first time, Nathan proved there was far more to him than just his prowess with a camera—interesting choices in vocabulary aside.

Nathan actually looks pleased with himself when he launches Warren’s sweatshirt across the room before diving back into his closet again. Warren doesn’t make the catch, and he almost falls off of his bed when he attempts to in the first place, just barely snagging his fingers on the side of the mattress before he pitches over and makes sweet oral love to his carpet below.

“I’m not cold,” he says once he’s got the garment in his hands, frowning when Nathan emerges again, now with a pair of Warren’s jeans. “Are we … going out?” Warren asks tentatively, holding his hand out for the jeans before Nathan even shows any signs of throwing those, too.

Nathan freezes for a fraction of a second, something that could have been called panic flitting across his face before turning back to a more neutral, Nathan-flavor of an expression. Warren doesn’t have the chance to wonder what that was about when the pants come flying, and he tries his best to keep them from knocking into, and subsequently breaking, anything important to him.

(Spoiler alert: he misses.)

“Sitting around inside all the time and dwelling on shit just gives the demons a chance to play out their shitshow, with your brain as the main stage,” is all Nathan says as he grapples Warren’s jacket out from the confines of his closet, which, really, is in desperate need of intervention. Warren realizes it’s his heavier jacket—the one plastered with certified NASA patches and with the launch dates of important expeditions embroidered along the collar and the hem—that Nathan finally manages to pull out and give a disappointed one-over. The sight of it excites him a little—it’s been far too warm for him to wear it ever since May had come to a close, but with December on the horizon, the air is starting to get cold enough to warrant donning it.

Despite the look Nathan initially gave the jacket, he doesn’t bother diving back into the confines of Warren’s overcluttered closet to look for a replacement. Instead, he sighs and meanders his way back to the edge of Warren’s bed, where Warren’s in the middle of changing his clothes. Warren feels the mattress sink with Nathan’s added weight as he’s pulling his head out the other side of the sweatshirt and resurfaces to find Nathan looking at him in what looks almost like confusion.

“What?” Warren asks, yanking the garment down over his torso with one hand and mussing his hair with the other. _Maybe I should have showered first_ , he immediately thinks. His hair doesn’t exactly feel spectacular after a night of actual hell.

“You look like shit,” Nathan says bluntly, and then tosses the jacket into Warren’s lap.

“Gee,” Warren replies drily, “any more of that and you’ll charm the pants right back off of me.”

“I’ll shut up if you hurry the fuck up so we can go.”

“You’re not even dressed yet,” Warren points out as Nathan stands back up again and cracks his neck.

“I’m _The Flash_ , dickstick,” Nathan quips without even turning around. “I’ll be ready to go and hauling ass out the building before you’ve even finished beating your meat in the showers.”

“Wh—but I’m not going to—I don’t—I’m already dressed, and I don’t do _that_ in—” Warren tries, spluttering spectacularly over which part of that sentence to address first, but Nathan is out of the room before Warren gets farther than his fourth word, the others are left to filter back on his own ears uselessly.

 

* * *

 

They decide on the bus without even a word between them—whether because it was a familiar comfort from the early days where making it to the end of the month was their greatest worry or because neither of them had the energy to do anything else, Warren isn’t sure—but he doesn’t question it and spends the whole ride sitting with his leg flush against Nathan’s and his eyes glued on a random point somewhere in the bus’s interior, his thoughts chaotic and constant, but nowhere near cohesive enough to bother dwelling on. Nathan, probably lost to his own cranial activities, doesn’t intervene on Warren’s even once, nor does he attempt at moving his leg into a more “hetero” position.

When they get there, Warren starts towards the beach the moment he’s out of the bus, but a hand grasping the collar of his jacket stops him with a firm grip and a choked “ _urk_ ” on his part. “This way,” is all Nathan offers when Warren gives him a glare, hand ghosted over his neck and throat noisily clearing itself, as if that would do anything for the sensation Nathan had wrought upon it. Warren grumbles under his breath as he swivels on his sneakers and follows Nathan’s hunched back down the sidewalk, but Nathan ignores him, striding across the road like he owns the place.

(Which, he kind of does. Warren seems to be forgetting about that particular Prescott detail more and more.)

Warren catches up to him easily in a few long, quick strides, and they walk in silence to whatever destination Nathan had in mind when he decided Warren needed to leave his room.

He knows where he is before he’s bothered to look up from his shoes, a knot of anxiety springing to life and lodging itself in the base of his throat and forcing him to inhale a deep stutter of a breath around it. Out of the corner of his eye, Warren sees Nathan’s head snap in his direction, confusion written all over the squinted lines of his face. Warren shakes his head, holding a hand up to ward Nathan off and signal he was okay, but Nathan decides to take the gesture as something else. Warren stumbles to a halt when Nathan swerves over to his side of the sidewalk and turns just enough so that his shoulder knocks into Warren first, not unlike the way Warren’s seen Hayden do to others when playing football. Only with significantly less force behind it, so it doesn’t knock Warren off his feet so much as just stop him in his tracks. Warren grunts, reaching up to grasp the shoulder.

“What was that?” Warren accuses at the same time Nathan says, “What’s wrong?”

“What? Nothing. I didn’t—” Warren stops, finally glancing over to the path that led up to the overlook. The same overlook he’d been to only a handful of times before. Nathan follows his gaze, brow merely wrinkled further when he looks back at Warren again.

“You don’t want to be here.” It’s not a question—it’s a statement. Nathan isn’t asking. He knows.

Warren shakes his head hastily, huffing out an unconvincing laugh pitched far too high. He has the decency to wince over the farce before he scrubs the back of his hand over his mouth and says, quietly, “I’m fine.”

Nathan’s eyes narrow, and his shoulder nudges deeper into Warren’s sternum. “Don’t play the sneak-ass snitch. What aren’t you telling me?”

“A snitch would tell, that’s what they do,” Warren mumbles first, then rolls his eyes when Nathan’s shoulder pushes insistently. “Alright, alright. It was the tornado. I was up here at the end when Rachel sent me back. I wasn’t really expecting to be back here so soon. I don’t go this way much.” Ever. He never went this way. Beyond the somewhat primal fear the place instilled in him before Rachel had even stuck her hands in their shit one last time, he just never had a reason to go there in the first place. Not since he’d had to check that one fated time to see if the storm was coming at all, or a time he had wandered by it with Nathan by his side during a time when Chloe and Max had been gunning for the top of the knoll, the former unaware of what had transpired there and the later unaffected by the vision Warren knows she’d had. Other than that, Warren’s never bothered to return. It’s not like there weren’t great views of the ocean elsewhere in the bay. It was a _bay_ , for Vulcan’s sake. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for this when you dragged me out of my room.”

After a moment where he’s clearly thrown by what Warren admits to him, Nathan’s eyes start searching him intensely enough that Warren has to drop his head to hide the way his face is starting to contort, emotional masks never really having been an area he was ever remotely adequate at. He’s not proud of his reaction to something he knows can’t have really happened, but, more than anything, he just doesn’t want Nathan having to deal with an aftermath he wasn’t responsible for.

Well—any more than he was already. Emotional turmoil wasn’t a favorite for either of them, and, knowing it wouldn’t last very long, Warren didn’t want _this_ moment to be one of the exceptions.

A hand covers his, the one he has cupped on Nathan’s shoulder, and Warren raises his head again to find Nathan giving him a look that screamed “you are one _huge_ fucking idiot, and I don’t even need to verbally tell you that anymore because you _know_ you are.”

Warren purses his lips in response before he’s even aware he’s doing it. “I’m fine, okay? It’s just a stupid mesa of land that intersects the sea at its base and happens to be where the storm touched down on the bay first in some other strings of reality. Short of some sort of freak landslide, there’s nothing big, bad, _or_ scary about it,” he pushes, and the hand tightens.

“Fuck this place,” Nathan declares, and starts walking in the other direction without first maneuvering out of Warren’s way. Warren stumbles back a few steps, then digs his heels in and stands his ground. Nathan stops completely, gaze staring Warren down from the corner of his eyes with a mixture of annoyance and inquiry. His head lilts back slightly, giving the impression that Nathan was somehow looking down his nose at Warren despite their heights relatively levelling out to one another, and Warren raises both eyebrows and mimics him. He knows he doesn’t even get close to doing it the way Nathan manages, but it does get Nathan to stop so he can glower at Warren’s lack of intimidation, so he counts it as a win.

“You wanted to be here, we’re staying,” Warren insists, swooping an arm out as if to usher Nathan on in the direction he’d been trying to retreat from. “I can be a big boy and keep from pissing my pants over a nightmare that didn’t actually hurt me.”

Nathan coughs out a laugh, a brief smile springing to his lips. “Rachel would love making someone piss their pants.”

“Not me!” Warren states defiantly, then grabs Nathan’s arm with his free hand and tugs, mildly surprised when Nathan doesn’t offer any resistance and allows Warren to guide him around and up the start of the path. He trudges along even when Warren drops his arm, shoving it and the other in the pockets of his jacket and tilting his head to watch Warren with a slightly aloof manner to the gesture. He doesn’t say anything, and Warren doesn’t really feel like filling the silence right off the bat, so, he gives it a good moment before bothering.

“Why are we here anyway?” Warren asks after the long, surprisingly difficult minute filled with nothing but the sounds of their shoes crunching on dried leaves. There had almost been an instinct to his need to break the silence sooner—though he can’t be sure if that reluctance to stay quiet was for his own benefit or for Nathan’s. Neither of them did very well with silence—not anymore.

“You didn’t trip,” Nathan says instead of answering Warren’s question. Warren frowns back at him, caught off-guard by the strange change in track.

“What?” he asks when no reasoning for Nathan’s declaration immediately springs to mind.

“You always trip there,” Nathan continues, pulling one hand out to point back behind them. When Warren looks, he notices a wayward tree root sticking up from the layer of debris and shakes his head in disbelief when Nathan continues, “This time you didn’t.”

“Okay, one? We’ve been here maybe twice together, how could you know how many times I’ve tripped on something? Don’t answer that.” Warren holds a finger out as if to cut Nathan off despite Nathan not having given any indication of actually answering. “And two,” he continues, a second finger springing up to meet the first, “I trip on _everything_ now. That root isn’t anything special. It just got a good day today. I’m sure I’ll assault it on another unfortunate visit.”

Nathan snorts, just once. “For as smart as you are, you’re extra fucking thick about yourself a lot.”

Warren sighs. They’re getting close to the end of the path already, so he has nothing to lose by indulging Nathan’s accusation. “Elaborate?”

“You don’t trip anymore. Yeah, you used to trip like a fucking foal flung from the womb ever since we came up here in the rain, but you haven’t even bumped into anything today. Jesus would be shitting himself over this miracle we have beheld today.”

Warren winces over Nathan’s simile, the mental image flashing vibrantly across the forefront of his mind (thanks, advanced biology), and makes a note to maybe try and infiltrate Nathan’s time with better sources to pull references from. Like pop culture. And videos with cats shooting lasers from their eyes.

Wait a minute. _Rain_?

“Since the rain?” Warren asks, expression melting back into a frown that he turns onto Nathan. Was Nathan guessing that timeframe, or had he really been paying that much attention to Warren—enough to pinpoint when exactly Warren had suddenly developed balance issues?

Nathan only shrugs, shoulders hunching back up to his ears as he curled in on himself again, which tells Warren that’s _exactly_ what he’d been doing. And probably still did.

“Huh,” Warren says nonchalantly in an attempt to dispel any awkwardness before it could manifest. “So that means it was … probably Rachel and her time fuck up.” Which was starting to explain a lot more than Warren had anticipated—not that he’d exactly be able to anticipate _any_ of this, let alone what Rachel had thrown upon him in the first place.

Nathan’s saved from offering a response (if he even would bother with one—Nathan played by his own social rules, and Warren knew now wasn’t going to be an exception) by the both of them reaching the crest of the lookout. It looks exactly the same as it always did, both when the rain had been turning the ground to a brown slurry and when everything seemed as if destruction had never touched it, like it did now.

Warren beelines for the sign to lean against, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and slumping down against it with a heavy sigh. It immediately makes his ass feel like it’s going numb with cold even inside his jeans, but he doesn’t stand up again. Instead, he sits further back against it and watches as Nathan starts up a pace along the circumference of the small area before it branched off into the path to the lighthouse, still hunched in on himself like he was awaiting a heavenly strike from God. The wind bursts against them once, blowing Nathan’s jacket stark against his frame and ruffling Warren’s hair violently where it barely even makes Nathan’s move an inch. For how tousled it looked combed back from his forehead, it was shockingly immobile. How much product did he put in that thing?

“So,” Warren starts once Nathan’s had a round and a half to himself, “ _why_ are we here?”

Instead of answering, Nathan keeps his head down and continues his slow trek around, and Warren decides to close his eyes and let Nathan be with only a vague noise of annoyance. He’d answer when he felt like it, and it’s not like Warren was going anywhere even if he didn’t.

So, he sits there and allows himself to try and keep from letting anything in his mind, left over from that night and the following morning he woke up to, overwhelm him.

The air curls through Warren’s hair, brushing it from his forehead in a chillingly soothing motion in stark contrast to the burst it had been just before. He hugs into his jacket a little tighter in response, feeling an odd mixture of comfort and apprehension from the place where he was sitting and waiting. Nathan had brought him here for a reason, but he knows it wasn’t because of what had happened with Rachel—he’s pretty sure that before now he hadn’t divulged that specific detail to Nathan when he explained his journey the first time, or in the two times that followed when he asked, but he knows, regardless of if he had or hadn’t, that Nathan wouldn’t have brought him here if he had known. Not when there was a chance Warren couldn’t handle being here. Nathan understood the nightmares that could be connected to things and places—and he knew better than to deliberately aggravate them like that. He wouldn’t have brought Warren here if he had known.

This was where Warren had met his end, his final end, the end that had not only solidified the finish to his time loops, but had allowed him to accept what had been done to him in order for him to get there at all.

This was where Warren had finished it all—so why was it anything but purely terrifying for him to be here? Why did it feel like he was almost meant to be here, feel almost like it had in that moment when he was facing down the thing that had changed his future forever? Why did it feel like he … belonged?

“Cold as witch tits up here,” Nathan finally says, rousing Warren from himself and bringing his attention onto him. He’s in the middle of scuffing his shoe along the ground, stopped from his meandering about by a particularly bare patch of dirt, with his head bent down as if looking for something. Warren doesn’t care to ask what it was he could be looking for—he knows he’ll find out sooner or later regardless of if he wanted to or not.

“Do you want my jacket?” he asks instead, and Nathan lifts his eyes to look over at Warren without lifting his head, the blue of his eyes just visible from beneath his pale eyelashes. The gesture does something strange to Nathan’s appearance, with the wind trying its best to pry his hair from its glossy prison and failing to do more than make it sway slightly, as if belonging in a movie with a main character that couldn’t do anything less than look perfect at all times. It makes him look almost roguish, mischievous. Like the person Warren knew Nathan was but different in a way Warren didn’t seem to have the words for. It does weird things to Warren’s stomach and weirder things to his head, the lilt of Nathan’s eyes on him, and it’s dispelled the moment Nathan opens his mouth.

“That thing?” He snorts. “I’d rather freeze to death than look like the walking definition of a desperate geek.”

Warren rolls his eyes, decidedly deducing his loss of mental coherence just previously to be a product of his exhaustion following the night he’d had. “You wore one of my shirts the other day, dude. When you were complaining about Hayden spilling beer all over you? That was a nerdy shirt you donned, right off of my nerdy body.”

That gets Nathan to lift his head fully, just so he can give Warren a squinted look of confusion. “What’s so nerdy about a box meowing?”

“Schrödinger’s cat?” Warren tries, and almost immediately Nathan’s face flips from confusion to understanding. He kicks the dirt sharply with the foot he’d had scraped into it, spitting a soft “fuck” of a curse under his breath. Warren beams at him as he drops his head again. “That’s what you get for being behind on the hip memes. You’ve been initiated,” he tells Nathan gleefully, and Nathan shakes his head once in a whip of a motion. “There’s no undoing what you’ve wrought upon yourself. _Which means_ you can take my jacket.”

Nathan raises his head again, frowning. “No. You don’t have jack on under that. I’m already wearing one anyway, I don’t need yours.”

“I have a sweatshirt on, dude. Courtesy of _your_ dressing skills. You only have a shirt on under that,” Warren says, pausing for a split second to wave his hand at Nathan’s general person. Nathan’s brow furrows in response and he looks down at himself, like he hadn’t realized what he’d been wearing until Warren had pointed it out. “Also courtesy of your dressing skills, which are obviously biased and need some serious work. Also, mine’s heavier. You’ve been wearing that same jacket since _school started_. In August!”

Nathan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look up at Warren again either, he just goes back to dragging the toe of his shoe through the ground like the conversation had never taken place. Warren huffs and shifts on the plaque, wincing slightly when he touches a cold part his ass had not yet managed to warm.

“We’ll switch,” Warren barters, but Nathan still doesn’t look up. Warren knows that’s his signal to drop it, but Warren’s not going to give up that easily. He’s seen Nathan with a blue face before—and it was not a pretty look. “Nathan,” Warren starts again, already pulling his arms out of his jacket sleeves and shrugging it off, “come on. Just take it, before I channel my inner Hayden and force you to.”

At that, Nathan’s head finally snaps up sharply, but, instead of the pissed-off spurring of anger Warren was expecting to see in Nathan’s gaze, Nathan’s eyes crinkle at the corners in a way distinctly different from the way he usually squinted. For a moment, Warren has to pause, caught off-guard by the unexpected change in expression. It was as if Nathan was challenging him to do  _exactly_ that.

No, yeah. He’s asking for it; Warren has seen that challenge in his eye before. He wanted Warren to run at him and see what would happen as a consequence. He was _baiting_ Warren with that look.

 _Not_ going to happen.

Warren swallows around a suddenly-dry throat, yanking the rest of the jacket’s embrace from his person and trying his best not to react when the chill of the air actually hits his torso through the protection his sweatshirt, in theory, offered. “I was kidding,” he states when Nathan makes no move for the jacket, offered to him in one outstretched arm. “I’m not tackling you, Nathan. You’d kick my ass and send me flying off the side of the cliff.”

Nathan turns his eyes to the sky with his lips twisted into an emo’s wet dream of a scowl, like he was begging Rachel to manifest a lightning bolt and strike him down where he stood. Warren has to admit that would be a pretty cool thing to witness if it could actually happen. Horrifically upsetting and almost definitely impossible, since he was pretty certain Rachel had no control over weather phenomena period (the snow and the storm pissed her off so much, Warren remembers vividly, so, no—she totally didn’t), but also _so_ fucking cool.

Warren’s lost to the mental image of Rachel going full _Storm_ on Nathan’s ass, so he doesn’t realize Nathan has relented until he’s prying the jacket from Warren’s unmindful grip and flinging his own back into Warren’s face. Warren splutters, arms pinwheeling forward to grab the object of clothing like it was actually assaulting him (and winning), and then levels Nathan with a dirty look that has no real heart in it before twisting around and shoving his arms in.

The jacket smells immediately of Nathan—duh, it just came directly off his body—and the things Warren now unconsciously associated with him (expensive cologne, that body wash with a label Warren couldn’t fully read and kept forgetting to translate, chemical developer and stale weed and the ghost of chlorinated water from too many parties held in the pool area of the school) and Warren finds the intensity of it relaxes him in a reflex of a reaction. It wasn’t anything new—hell, his bed had a tendency to smell more like Nathan than it did Warren nowadays with how much more time Nathan spent in it lounging around than Warren did himself—but, right in this moment, in this place he had no actual want of being in, it was a key factor to the way the muscles in his shoulders relax as the fabric settles down on them, and there was no point to denying that fact.

“Better?” Warren asks, zipping the jacket up as high as it would go and watching Nathan shake his hands in the slightly too-long sleeves that now adorned his arms. Nathan rolls his head on his neck, then fixes Warren with a look and a raised eyebrow. He didn’t bother zipping the jacket up, and his black shirt looks entirely too good against the dark blue of the jacket’s lining. One of his sleeves droops back down, and he flips Warren the bird from beneath it. “That’s what I thought,” Warren says triumphantly. “And, look, you don’t look like a nerd at all. Well—not _completely_. More like a wannabe—”

“Finish that sentence and you’ll have to go on a search in the ocean that would make the Titanic weep in jealousy after I rip off your asscheeks and punt them into the fucking sunset,” Nathan warns. Warren mocks a gasp of shock, then starts cracking up at the idea. After a second, Nathan follows, his head thrown back and knees bent from the force of it and his voice ringing solidly in the cold around them, untouched by any of the gusts of air that had been assaulting them just before. It makes Warren feel giddy, even as the laughter dies and Nathan starts up his pacing again, now picking up rocks and sticks and various unseen objects to chuck over the side of the outlook, sometimes getting a little too close to Warren’s head for his comfort. He holds onto the feeling for as long as he can, but it takes Nathan staring at something in his hand for a beat too long for him to finally question what it is Nathan’s trying to accomplish by almost beaning Warren right off his perch.

“What are you even doing?” Warren asks, watching the way his fingers hold the object in his grip almost loosely. Nathan turns his head just enough to catch Warren’s gaze on him and hesitates, then, surprisingly, lowers his arm and shoves his hand, and the object in it, into the pocket of his jacket without a word.

“Nothing,” is his very helpful explanation as he shrugs once and meanders over to Warren, his head lilted to the side. “Do you think Rachel knows we’re up here?” he asks, and Warren frowns at the sudden choice in subject matter. Aside from making Warren potentially piss his pants, Rachel hadn’t been brought up by Nathan even once that day since the event of that early morning, and it was startling for him to suddenly decide now was the time he wanted to change that.

“Dude, Rachel sees  _everything_ ,” Warren tells him once he’s had a second to right himself. “She even saw us in the shower together.”

Nathan shoots Warren a look that screams incoherence and mild alarm. There was such an intensity to it, it was almost comical. “The fuck are you talking about? We’ve _never_ showered together.”

“Not actually showering, when we were hiding from the guards that one time. After we broke into the school?”

Nathan blinks, the confusion still clear on his face, and then, slowly, changes to understanding and more than a small amount of relief. “Oh, yeah,” he says with a calm that didn’t ring true to Warren’s ears. “I forgot we did that.”

“She caught it and saw it. Seriously, she sees _all_.” Warren frowns. “It’s kind of terrifying, honestly.”

Nathan snorts, scuffs his shoe in the dirt once as if stalling, and then digs back into the pocket of the jacket and pulls out something, this time holding it in a way that Warren could clearly see what it was.

In his palm is a large piece of what looks like molded plaster, shaped like a large nose or a bird’s beak and painted red and gold, like a part of something someone would wear to a masquerade ball. Or up on stage at an opera, or a play. Something that—looks like it matches exactly to the headdress Warren had seen in sitting on the floor of Rachel’s room.

“Is that—Rachel’s?” Warren stutters. Rachel had been here? But her outfit had been whole—not broken. Had she wanted it to look like that and made it so—or had it been broken after she’d died?

“No,” Nathan replies quietly, and there’s an unmistakable hint of guilt to his tone. “It’s mine.”

“You’ve been back here,” Warren says faintly, realization clicking into place. He blinks, failing immediately to understand Nathan’s potential reasoning behind doing such a thing. Finally, he relents. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” says Nathan begrudgingly, his eyes set on that piece of mask in his hand. “I guess I thought there was more here or something. Or that I needed to be here. Asinine crap I made up in my head, maybe! I don’t fucking know,” he repeats, frustrated, and shoves the piece away in his pocket once again. “Whatthefuckever. I don’t want to be here anymore, this is fucking _stupid_.”

Warren, baffled by Nathan’s sudden change, doesn’t immediately scramble off of the plaque when Nathan pivots on his foot and starts to storm off. Once he actually does, he has to jog to catch up to Nathan, and Nathan doesn’t look at him as they both make their way down the path and back towards the bus stop. At the last moment, just as Warren’s readying himself to charge across the road in order to stay by Nathan’s side and try his damned best to not get hit by a car, Nathan swerves and starts for the beach. Warren almost hears the breaking noise his shoes make as he scrambles to make the same turn, yet again lengthening his strides in order to catch up with Nathan, who walks _way_ faster than someone his size should be allowed to.

Warren catches him three feet onto the beach, and he’s decidedly _not_ panting slightly when he does, dammit.

Nathan lopes along the sand like he’d been born to walk it, his shoes hardly even sinking into the grains as he goes—unlike Warren, who could already feel the grit in his socks. With an unbreaking gait, he guides Warren to the very shoreline—close enough that one good wave could reach them and soak their shoes to the socks underneath. Warren really doesn’t want to go back to his dorm in any semblance of wet, but he makes no move to leave Nathan’s side.

Nathan stares out at the horizon with squinted eyes and a pinched face, the gears of his mind so clearly working in a way Warren couldn’t interrupt, and Warren waits. He stands there next to Nathan, close enough to nearly touch, but no so close that he could be disturbing, and he waits, watching the same horizon without any of the connections Warren knows Nathan feels with it.

“Tell me again,” Nathan finally says, at no more than a solemn whisper Warren almost doesn’t hear through the winds of the shore. Warren doesn’t have to ask what he means.

It wasn’t the first time he’d asked—not really. He’d asked Warren again once they’d gotten comfortable in Warren’s room that morning, and then another later time when Warren had struggled to do so the first, but less and less had come from each time he’d tried.

Warren had tried to tell Nathan what had happened to him each time he asked for the story again, but each time he tried to give a recount of the same thing, it was as if the details became blurrier and more distorted in his memory. He started questioning things even as he recalled them a second time to further his tale, and it became clear from Nathan’s expression when he had to correct Warren that it wasn’t just Warren failing to keep himself straight.

It was as if his memory was erasing itself—like it was removing something that never should have happened.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Rachel had said to him. Warren had not meant to visit what he did, hadn’t meant to experience what he was thrown into.

Maybe time was correcting itself. Erasing the knowledge of what it had done wrong from someone who shouldn’t have experienced the slip. Maybe, as a human, Warren just wasn’t equipped to deal with something he had no control over.

“I—I can’t,” Warren admits faintly, feeling like he’d just failed at something very crucial and let too many people down in the process. Nathan’s head turns to look at him, and Warren meets his eyes with an expression he knows mirrors how he feels, because Nathan’s face softens wordlessly, making him look infinitely younger. “It’s like it’s … fading. It doesn’t—make sense. I shouldn’t be forgetting so fast yet, right? It just happened last night.”

“Shit’s what time does, makes you forget things,” Nathan says with an air of nonchalance, then snorts. “Or are you going to say something annoying like ‘time isn’t real.’”

Warren shakes his head. “Time is a social construct, yeah, okay, but that doesn’t make it not real. I get we all experience it linearly because that’s what we’re taught to do via the society we live in, but it’s hard to comprehend the idea of other constructs when there isn’t any reasoning behind the things that a lineal understanding already gives us. Maybe time’s a pool, maybe it’s all happening at once! But how do we think of it like that? You can’t mentally accept a concept without a structure that the human brain can understand, and, since we have to have a foundation of logic in place before any idea can really be—” Warren pauses abruptly, pulled back to himself by the hand knocking into the side of his head as if swatting a fly away, and he winces away from where Nathan's hand had materialized next to him. “What?” he asks in annoyance, pressing the palm of his hand to the spot Nathan had swatted.

“You weren’t speaking English. Figured you’d need a good jostle to get you working again.”

Warren narrows his eyes. “I’m not a freaking Xbox, Nathan. Jeez.”

Nathan’s lips curl in response to Warren’s statement, showing a hint of his too-white canines, and Warren immediately knows what’s coming. “Good,” he quips, lilting his head away. “I don’t want to have to blow you to get you to work again.”

“Oh my god,” Warren groans, making an exaggerated expression of disgust. “Really? Xboxes don’t use cartridges!” What is it with Nathan and making jokes that don’t even make sense? “I know you know that. I’ve seen you play one before.”

Nathan mimes Warren’s words with both his hands and his mouth, using a childish exaggeration to make the action that much more immature. And, then, he scoffs and rolls his eyes, like the whole thing wasn’t worth his time. “Can’t take a freakin’ joke, Graham? God.”

“It was a shitty joke.”

Shitty joke or not, Nathan takes the declaration as a challenge, and spends the entirety of the bus ride back to Blackwell loudly trying to come up with better blowjob jokes, much to Warren’s absolute chagrin.

 

* * *

 

The moment they get back to the dorms, Warren decides he needs a shower and drops Nathan off in his room before doing so. Miraculously, he finds Nathan flipping through that massive Stephen King book of Warren’s when he gets back and everything seemingly untouched. Once Warren’s back in the room, though, Nathan places his bookmark, sets the book aside, and gets up to start rummaging around. Warren lets him without even bothering to tell him not to take anything, because he knows it’ll only spur Nathan into doing _exactly_ that.

“The shiz is this thing?” Warren glances over at Nathan to find him scrutinizing his Dungeon Master’s screen, which he must have unearthed from the pile of planning notes Warren had shuffled to a corner of his room at some point. He looks torn between confusion, distaste, and mockery, settled in some strange middle ground that only Nathan Prescott could manage with any real clarity. The board flops awkwardly as Nathan holds it higher, squinting at the mural of dragons in the center like he’d never seen the creature before in his life. “There is no _inch_ of this thing that doesn’t make me instinctively want to pummel your face in for being a nerd.”

Warren rolls his eyes, knowing that to be a vivid fabrication of a lie, and pads over to fix the mess Nathan had made by pulling the board, which had been at the very bottom, from the pile. “It’s a DM screen, Nathan,” he tells him, crouching down to pick up papers as he goes and channeling the psyche of an exasperated older sister from some cut-and-paste Romcom movie for the perfect tone. It makes him sound like he’s asking a question. “Think of it like a cheat sheet.”

Nathan switches his gaze from the screen, which he’d laid out on the bed to look at in full, to Warren, his expression flipping from “what the fuck” to “why the fuck” effortlessly. “Are you telling me the bigshit brain boy can’t remember what a dragon looks like?”

“ _No_.” Warren sighs, miming a flipping action in the air with his finger as he approaches the bed and takes a seat. “Try turning it around, dingus.”

Nathan does, and then goes completely silent as he picks up the board in both hands and starts reading the notes and rules Warren knew were plastered all over the backside of the board. Warren watches him with a fondness he doesn’t really have the exact vocabulary to explain, but knows, somewhere in his gut, that he wouldn’t dare exchange for anything else.

And, suddenly, without any feasible reasoning except to drastically contrast what he was feeling in a moment of pure masochism, Warren has the fleeting wonder of what exactly his life would be right now had Warren never had the idea of picking Nathan up to help in his capture of Jefferson. And then, by extension, if the only reason he cared for Nathan at all was because of something he himself had never actually created. Which then made him wonder—was any of this, whatever it was, even real?

Rachel had sent Warren after Nathan and, while she had never clarified just how much of a hand she’d had in the direct workings of that particular instance, there must have been something there to push him in Nathan’s direction. Some sort of connection that couldn’t be overwritten and _had_ to happen. Right?

Sure, Warren had actually only gone to Nathan in order to get to Jefferson, but he had to think of that route in the first place. And that could mean there’d been a spiritual sort of connection that had never faded, right?

_Right?_

_No_ , Warren thinks. No, because Warren had gone all the loops before the final one keeping Nathan out of the picture. Rachel likely didn’t have anything to do with Warren’s eventual contact with Nathan—that had been all Warren. And he’s not sure how he feels about that.

In the end, though, there was no otherworldly connection between them, Warren firmly assets to himself. At least, he’s pretty sure there isn’t. That had only been a frantic illogical whim his brain had conjured up as an explanation. Otherwise, wouldn’t Nathan have a better inkling of when Warren was _actually_ drugged, instead of always having to stare him down like a cat on the verge of kicking some serious ass?

But, wait. He had known Warren was in some sort of distress from his … nightmare thing. He’d said himself Warren had stopped breathing. And Warren has no reason to think Nathan was lying about that. It’s likely he was in a state of suspense of some kind while in Rachel’s domain—she’d said herself the living didn’t belong with the dead, and she was very much dead. So, Warren not breathing? Very believable.

Which begs the question— _how_ exactly did Nathan realize Warren wasn’t breathing? Nathan had been up on the couch, Warren on the floor. The only contact between them, as far as Warren knew before falling asleep, had been the hand Nathan had draped over the side of the couch. There’s no way he could have felt Warren stop breathing just from the miniscule contact, so how could he have possibly known before the lack of oxygen had awoken Warren on his own?

The question clicks into Warren’s brain like a lost puzzle piece finally found, and he rounds on Nathan with a squinted look of confusion. Nathan looks sharply back, tense at first, but his expression melts into confusion after a second where it had only been aggression.

“How did you know I wasn’t breathing?” Warren shoots at him before he has a chance to voice any of said confusion.

Nathan hesitates, blinking like it would help him connect the dots of the sudden conversation. “What?” he finally says.

“You were on the couch. Above me. How could you tell when I stopped breathing?”

“What kind of asswit question is that?”

“Just a question, you can’t figure that shit out like some sort of disturbance in the Force,” Warren mumbles, but doesn’t bother with any kind of defensive tone. Despite this measure, Nathan looks far more agitated than Warren had anticipated at the question, and he immediately knows he triggered something else by asking it.

Shit.

“Nathan?” Warren tries, frowning up at him from where he sat on the bed. Nathan’s expression is clouded, and he keeps his eyes averted from Warren specifically.

“I was trying to get out of my _damn head_ , okay?” he hisses, the defense lilt to his words about five notches too high for Warren not to immediately think an unknown sore spot had been prodded. “I wasn’t being a creep!”

“Whoa. Hey, I didn’t say you were—”

“Shut up, you were  _thinking_ it.”

Warren holds one hand up as if that could help back his statement when he claims, “I really wasn’t. After the shit that went down, I’d probably be watching you all night too, if the roles were reversed.”

Nathan glares down at him like he could light Warren on fire with his gaze alone. “How can I trust that? I couldn’t even trust you were sleeping and not fucking _dying on me_!”

“Nathan, hold on—”

“I can’t trust _anything_ anymore!” Nathan spits, throwing his hands into the air. “With all this crazy, supernatural crap happening, I can’t tell what’s going to happen next! We thought it was over, but no! We have another stupid fucking thing jerking us around like a shitty undercover drug dealer! Just when I think we’re fine, we’re a-oh-fucking-kay, everything _blows the fuck up again_!”

Nathan’s voice, pitched high and threaded through with stress and anger, echoes around Warren’s small room. His hands are clenched fists by his sides, knuckles so white Warren knows the skin of his palms will be pinched red when he relaxes them again, and they tremble slightly with more than just the fury Warren knows he feels. They shake like they did the first time Warren had decided he needed Nathan’s help—and it’s more than just what most would assume he feels. It’s fear that makes him like this. It’s anger and anxiety and fear fueling him right now—fear for what has come, and what he thinks could come again.

Rachel was right. Warren knew things he never could have known about Nathan before, or otherwise. She was right about so many things, and he’d been too stubborn to tell her so at the time.

(She knew. He knew she knew. She was a god in her own right now, if only to a handful of people, and gods always knew when they were right.)

Nathan’s chest heaves faintly with breaths that come out in quiet rasps, so quiet Warren wouldn’t have been able to hear them if he hadn’t been close enough to feel the heat of his body radiating out to warm the air between them. So quiet they could easily be concealed behind a closed expression and a turn away from anyone who could see. Warren reaches out, taking the hem of Nathan’s (Warren’s) jacket between his fingers, and pulls gently. Nathan’s eyes snap down to the tension that runs up the jacket’s length from the pull, then up to Warren’s face. And, then, he closes them, his jaw clenched tight enough that the tendons in his neck stand out sharply.

“It’ll be okay,” Warren says, but it’s without any of the subtle tones of reassurance a situation like this usually would have warranted. “It’s smart not to trust anything, especially not when there are so many people out there itching to fuck you over just because of who you are.” Warren shakes his head slowly, willing the grind of his teeth to ease as he speaks, “You don’t trust anything? Not even statistically speaking, this town is the right place to have that mindset. Nothing is trustworthy in life. Trust no one.”

Nathan opens his eyes slowly, and when he does, he looks like that person he sometimes became when he wasn’t quick enough to pull up the shroud he wanted everyone to see. He looks like the Nathan that was kept underneath, the Nathan he likely was in the years where Warren had never existed, before life had opened its maw and chewed him up, throwing him back to live with what had happened to him. He looks like the Nathan Warren hadn’t seen enough times to count with more than one hand, the Nathan that was only released accidentally, because nowhere was safe, and the only way to make it through was to never let his guard down.

He was still Warren’s Nathan, but, like this, he was Warren’s Nathan without the pinched mask, without the vortex of emotions and the onslaught of scathing quips. He was still Warren’s Nathan, but instead at the bare of his bones, where nothing of the outside had touched and changed and warped him into the person he was when everyone was looking.

“Maybe I’m fucked for this, but I trust _you_ ,” is what he tells Warren quietly, openly, and, for a moment, Warren feels like he’s been punched square in the chest from the way he suddenly can’t breathe. And then, like someone had reached in and prompted him with a line of code no one should ever have the power to create, he feels an urge so strong that he loses himself to the feeling completely.

The urge pulls him, entraps him, utterly overcomes him in a moment of pure weakness, and his fingers tangle briefly as they clutch desperately into Nathan’s perfectly-coifed hair and yank him down to where Warren sat on the bed. Their lips crash more than they lock, but, somehow, they don’t knock their teeth together—though that could be because Nathan’s hands are suddenly encasing Warren’s shoulders like they plan to crush them to sinew and dust, which, in turn, gives him a form of control over Warren’s initiation. Warren doesn’t have the attention span to give the thought any wonder, regardless, so in the end it doesn’t _really_ matter.

The desperation lasts for half a heartbeat, if not less, but, to Warren, it feels like it lasts for an epoch before it falls to an ease Warren thinks even Nathan hadn’t expected from himself.

There’s no rejection—no pushing, despite the way Nathan still holds Warren’s shoulders like a vice, no noises of outrage or attempts to twist away like any other act of phantom intimacy usually caught from Nathan. No acts of refusal like Warren, even if he’d never admit it, had thought to expect the one time (three—it was at least three times, but who was counting?) he’d imagined how kissing Nathan could really go when it wasn’t in the form of a drunken distraction tactic.

No—this was better than Warren expected from someone like Nathan, better than he could have dreamed. Not that he’d ever _actually_ dreamed about kissing Nathan.

Really. He hadn’t.

(At least, not that he remembered.)

This? This was leagues more than he had wanted from the action, and better than he had thought Nathan capable of. Which—as Nathan’s hands relax just enough to slide up and pull Warren’s face back into place when he tries move away—he dimly realizes yet again was his fault for not giving Nathan enough credit. But then Nathan’s teeth scrape along Warren’s bottom lip, and he only has a moment to think that maybe the previous “kiss” hadn’t been _too_ divergent from Nathan’s true nature before he’s lost completely to the white noise the action renders his mind to.

He’s pretty sure the kiss still doesn’t last longer than a few minutes and doesn’t even remotely constitute as making out, but Warren’s whole body is vibrating with excitement and nerves and things he doesn’t want to name when Nathan finally decides it’s time to let them breathe, and his heart hammers in his chest so distinctly that he finally understands what the other times it had happened had meant.

When Nathan pulls away, it’s nothing more than an inch two—too close for Warren to see anything but the skin of Nathan’s nose when he slits his eyes open, and more than close enough for Warren to feel Nathan’s stuttered breaths ghosting against his lips.

Then, like someone had shocked him, Nathan jumps away, and Warren’s eyes snap open fully in alarm.

Nathan’s gaze darts frantically, switching focus on each of Warren’s eyes like he couldn’t decide where to look, the back of one fisted hand pressed to his mouth with stark white knuckles. The other hand held Warren’s shoulder tightly, but at a distance, with his elbow locked firmly into place. As if he both couldn’t get far enough away from Warren but was also afraid he’d bolt if Nathan let him go. His chest heaved faintly from beneath that black shirt, and Warren could just barely hear the air he pulled in and pushed back out his lungs.

Warren sat rooted on the mattress, hands twisted so firmly in his sheets a worry pinged in the back of his mind over ripping them between his fingers. His head buzzed with an adrenaline-spiked static unlike any other he’d ever experienced before, and his chest burned something fierce with a need for oxygen that Warren couldn’t seem to allow himself to breath. Like he was afraid if he even moved, even just enough to take in air, everything that just happened would all fall to pieces.

The time stretches between them, first a moment that feels like a decade, then a minute that feels like nothing more than a heartbeat and a half, and then, at the same time, Nathan swallows audibly and Warren gasps in a much-needed breath, and it all spirals from there.

Warren won’t remember later how exactly point A became point B, but, right now, all he can think about is the hand clutching his hair in a grip that brinks on hurt and a lack of want to stop it when it only amplifies the way Nathan is kissing him—a kind of control he knows he’d never be able to replicate no matter how much experience he’d get in the area.

It’s still not rough—still doesn’t feel bruising or crushing or any of those adjectives he’d always thought would just be to Nathan via his very nature. It’s like a grasp of reality, a clarity just beneath the swath of disbelief everything edges on right now. When Nathan pulls away again, Warren almost trails after him—would have, had he not been kept in place by that very grip.

They stare at each other again. Nathan doesn’t let go of his hair, but Warren can’t bring himself to stop it. He can’t even bring himself to _want_ to, because the feeling of it grounds him in the moment almost as much as the contact had, and he realizes, especially at a time when everything almost felt like it could never be a reality Warren himself could live in, that he needs it. He needs the contact, the almost-pain and the clarity it gives him. He needs all of it—all of _this_.

All of Nathan and all of what he was currently giving to him. What he had been giving to him, what Warren knew Nathan could never stop giving.

Warren needed it, and he wasn’t about to put a stop to any part of it.

And, from the way Nathan gives him a second to blink reality back to himself before pushing in, just once, again—just enough to brush a contact Warren knows he, embarrassingly, tries his hardest to lean into—Warren can tell Nathan knows it, too, even if he didn’t fully realize the things he did for him.

A laugh bubbles up from Warren’s throat, effectively startling the both of them enough that Warren jumps at the sound and Nathan flinches, a look flashing across his face that could have been interpreted as hurt if it had lasted for more than a beat. Warren swallows thickly.

“Didn’t see that plot twist coming,” he rasps out. Nathan doesn’t answer, but Warren’s too busy suddenly realizing Nathan has his hand on his leg to notice anything that might be happening on Nathan’s face. He tries _really_ hard not to think about that. Not right now. He’s not ready for anything like that yet. He’s not even sure he was ready for _this_.

But Nathan always seemed to come with things Warren wasn’t quite ready for. Things that Warren _thought_ he wasn’t quite ready for—at least, not until they were happening to him and, at the end, Nathan had been the catalyst he’d needed to get where he’d wanted to be.

 _That_ , though—he knew he wasn’t ready for.

Nathan, by the look of his blown pupils and the churning intensity of his stare, didn’t seem to be either. He looked more like he was trying to process the kisses alone, and his feelings regarding them. Warren couldn’t tell if he was more spooked by what had just happened or junkied out by the rush he hopes Nathan feels like he does, or some mixture of the two, but there was definitely something happening in Nathan’s brain right now that Warren wasn’t privy to. He’d made no move to get away from Warren, though, so, whatever it was happening in there, it wasn’t enough to make him flee the scene. Warren counts that as a win, regardless of if it might all fall back again, and swallows around a sudden need to pull Nathan back to him before he was ready for it.

After a moment where he doesn’t blink, Nathan’s grip tightens in a pulse, then slackens, and the hand slides over the curve of Warren’s shoulder and down his arm in time with the deep breath Nathan takes, his eyes finally sliding shut. His hand lands on the mattress, not on Warren’s hand but rather only close enough that their pinkies overlap at the second knuckle, and Warren can feel the way his skin burns hotter than it usually did. Warren doesn’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one, but he knows from the way Nathan slowly starts to slump first at the neck and then further all around that the air was clear, and that he wasn’t going to try to kiss Warren again. Warren sighs, unintentionally loud, and Nathan’s eyes slowly open again to give Warren a look from where he was half-slumped directly over Warren’s person. When he doesn’t say anything, Warren huffs a laugh.

“What,” Warren asks, voice cracking over the word from behind his defiant grin, “did my mad kissing skills render you speechless?”

Immediately, Nathan’s face pinches up. “Oh, Jesus fucking _hell_ , Graham.”

“That’s more like it,” Warren singsongs back from his position on the bed, and then grunts hard when the DM screen is thrown at him. It doesn’t stop him from coughing out a laugh of joy all the same.

The kissing isn’t brought up at all in the following hours where they do nothing but watch movies, argue over D&D elements Warren _knows_ Nathan doesn’t understand but demands to give input on all the same, and sling popcorn at each other until Warren’s room is peppered with minuscule landmines just begging to be imbedded in his carpet—but it’s far from forgotten for either of them when the event reimagines itself in the form of sudden encroachment spurred into tentative pecks that turn to lingering touches, stalling silences, and quick retreats, as if neither of them have ever done this before and weren’t sure how to go about dealing with it in anything but a physical fashion.

(Technically, Warren’s almost certain neither of them _has_ —Warren’s never been on a kissing bases with _anyone_ before, let alone a guy, and Nathan, based on his homophobic tendencies alone, likely hasn’t with anyone but a girl. So, really, it was a newfound territory for the both of them.)

It was new ground rediscovered at odd ends of the hours and never overreached, and neither of them end up taking the lead on the act more than the other. It’s a fair game of give and take, if a little shakily founded and perpetuated, but there are never any words manifested from it that could have anything to do with the subject. It’s a place they’re both not ready to dig into—not yet, not now when it’s so newly birthed and could so easily fall away again—so neither of them try. It’ll come when they’re ready, Warren knows. Be it the next day or the next week or the next whenever, he knows it’ll come when it needs to. When they’re ready.

He’s not ashamed to say he asks Nathan to spend the night in that wordless way they’ve become accustomed to using, with gestures meant to prolong the other’s stay in the form of offered films and overturned covers (except they’d been lounging in Warren’s bed ever since they’d gotten back, so it was more of him not taking the space Nathan vacated when going to shower and brush his teeth for the night), nor is he ashamed to admit that, knowing Nathan would be the one running from sleep yet again that night, he stays up as late as he possibly can and takes a little more than he gives as the night marches steadily on into morning.

Nathan doesn’t stop him, doesn’t even offer up a snarky, acid-dipped comment at any time when Warren catches his eye and choses his moment as right then and there to act. He does nothing but accept it all, with a hesitance still so unexpected of him, and, as the sunlight of the next day starts to filter in through the school-issued blinds covering his window and exhaustion starts sticking Warren’s eyelids together, leans over and murmurs something in Warren’s ear that he doesn’t quite catch before falling under, but sounds suspiciously like a phrase of gratitude he absolutely must have hallucinated in his fatigued state of mind.


	11. Goodbyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided to break this chapter up, so if you’re following the spoilers over on my Tumblr, you might notice some parts are missing that were supposed to be here! Those will (read: should) be in the next one instead. This chapter and the next one both got away from me, and the tone changed too abruptly for me to just keep it all as one single (albeit massive) chapter. So! I cut it off and finished this one up so I could really have at it in the next one.
> 
> Also, casual reminder and warning that Nathan has a sharp, mean tongue and uses words he really shouldn't. AKA, slur warning, welcome back! (Like it ever really left, huh.)

The days that lead up to midterms blur together for Warren in ways time never had before; not even when he’d been reliving the weeks before the storm for the fourth time over and hadn’t yet figured out the point to all that time he’d been given.

He does the things he always knew he’d have to do—things like study, wait for replies from the colleges he’d forgotten to apply to when shit had finally hit the fan in the right ways (and hopefully successfully squeeze by on the deadlines he had just barely managed to meet), and try his best to scrape together a decent excuse not to go home over winter break like his parents wanted him to.

And he does the things he never could have fathomed he’d have to do—though he knows, in some detached way, that maybe a funeral was always in his immediate future, and the only true variable for that scenario was not if it happened at all, but rather who would be in the casket when they lowered it into the ground.

 

* * *

 

Her funeral takes place on a cold Saturday, so early in the morning that the weak sunlight nearly drowns in the freezing drizzle that filters through it, not very long after her body had been discovered. They had worked quickly, almost suspiciously fast, to get her back to her parents and allow them the goodbye that no one thought would really be this final.

Many people show up, both people Warren knows and more he doesn’t. More people than Warren had expected, if he was being honest. He remembered Rachel in name only from the days before she’d vanished, and even then, it hadn’t been much of a memory to go on. It—no, _she_ hadn’t been his clique—and, so, by extension, not his business. He laughs bitterly at that twisted change of fate now, under his breath, as he treks down the path to where she was being laid to rest. It’s a quiet noise, almost lost to the huffing of exertion given alongside it, but Nathan hears him all the same and levels him with a burning look. Warren has to wrap his cold fingers around the circumference of Nathan’s shaking wrist to get him to stop glaring at him with those eyes, ones that hadn’t seen sleep properly in weeks and hadn’t been goaded to seek it. Warren would try his best to force him to sleep eventually, they both knew, but that time hadn’t come. Not just yet. Not with the circumstance barring slumber from being anything short of a particularly cruel kind of torment.

They reach the end of the designated path, where everyone else has fallen in and is settling around as they wait, and Warren’s grip tightens instinctively when the tremors of Nathan’s curled fist only seem to deepen. His heart unconsciously skips a beat, remembering a time passed when this was a warning for something Warren had specifically needed to change. But he knows Nathan’s taken his medicine, and he knows this has nothing to do with a treatable anguish. He doesn’t let go, though, even if _this_ isn’t something he can fix.

_This_ , Nathan has to work through, with nothing more than he himself allows as his guides and comforts, and Warren reminds himself of that even as he feels something cold boil low in his gut as Rachel’s casket is lowered down into the hole granted to her and almost all at once gone from sight. It was over, and it was all said and done—but nothing was ever really finished. There were always ashes where something had burned away, when it became dead to a world that still held those left behind, and s _omeone_ had to rise from them. Whether they realized they were doing it or not, they rose. Because life moved on, and those still left living had to deal with that.

Warren sees Chloe’s blue head bob around in the front of the crowd, lowering and raising and lowering again, and Max’s freckled face turns towards her in a flash, her nose just barely seen from where Warren and Nathan stand almost at the very back of the congregation. He hadn’t heard a word from either of them since the day Rachel’s body had been found, but Warren hadn’t exactly tried as hard as he might have in a time before. Max had left his car keys where he could find them, and he hadn't thought to go looking for her when she didn't show again. He'd been too busy elsewhere to bother thinking much about her at all.

Nathan turns sharply the moment the gathering is getting ready to disperse, almost jostling Warren’s grip away in the sudden, violent action, and Warren follows him away from the new grave without anything exchanged between them.

 

* * *

 

It takes time for Nathan to recover following the event—with everything else piled on top—and Warren watches him as he retreats back into himself with snipes and sour insults that have no real backbone to them, the ghosts of things he needed to say but didn’t want to mean. They fall back to what they had been, for the moment, but without a feeling of resentment for what they were letting go, if only for the time being. They knew they had time— _Warren_ knew they had time, and Nathan showed no indication that he understood it any differently, so it’s not a difficult loosening from what had manifested in a rush of gained understanding and newly-birthed distress. It’s not an alienation from one another, and it was still close enough to turn eyes when they weren’t supposed to be looking, but it was a necessary lapse in what had been established after a night where they both learned what they meant to one another in an entirely new fashion, so inherently distinct from what they had known before.

When Warren suggests, in a way that he knew showed his concern without it being upfront, that Nathan go back to the therapist he’d started seeing following Jefferson’s arrest, Nathan doesn’t even sit on the notion. Doesn’t reject it or try to make it something it wasn’t. Instead, he looks at Warren through eyes that still hadn’t seen enough sleep in over a week and had witnessed far too much beyond it, and he nods. Just once, a jerky, almost bouncing motion of compliance. And then he leaves.

And when he comes back again, he’s better. Not a lot—not even enough for anyone who didn’t know him well enough to really see—but enough to be a start, a path for him to follow and work along, and that, at least, was something he had always been good at doing.

Warren doesn’t see Max a lot following the funeral, though he does manage to flag her down once when Nathan is gone for the few days he takes away from campus and then more again once he returns, but their interactions are solemn. They stay to topics they know, like school and movies and the other’s well-being. She asks once about Nathan, and he asks twice about Chloe, but they both know there aren’t enough words to really say what goes on where the other can’t be. He doesn’t see Chloe, but he knows she’ll come back. And, eventually, she does. Just like Nathan, she does.

Warren doesn’t see as much of her as he did before—and he finds he misses her more than he had thought he might—but he doesn’t let himself worry about it where there wasn’t worry to spare. In the face of a closing semester with midterms to ace and a more-than-friend with an unspoken need, Warren has other things to put his mind to. So, he puts that on the backburner and allows Chloe to be the creature of habit they all had the capacity to be. Things might not ever be the same again, but Warren had a feeling they wouldn’t be too far from what they had been before, because what the four of them had between them, as odd and erratic as it might have been, was a comfort. One that, as humans, they weren’t likely to simply give up when there was no reason to. Chloe would fall back to her snarky ways eventually, and Warren would wait patiently for her to come back to herself like he was everyone else. He had other things to worry about. And Nathan was never one to make it easy.

 

* * *

 

Even though they spend their days much like they had in the time following the first instance where they thought it all had been done, they don’t spend their nights alone. Not anymore—not from the moment they don’t have to, when Nathan returns and falls into the unspoken rhythm they’d barely touched upon before Warren had been sent back one last time.

Be it in Warren’s room with the both of them crammed in his bed, shoulders touching and ankles crossing and Warren sometimes finding himself curled up on the carpet come morning, or be it in Nathan’s room, sometimes in the bed casually entwined in the perpetual darkness or on the couch, with Nathan sprawled along its expanse and Warren watching him from below, one hand held up like an offering always taken without a word—they stay together when the sun sets, even on the nights where they don’t sleep. They don’t do anything more. It’s not the time, and maybe it’ll never be the time again, but Warren can’t find a shit to give the idea when he has what he wants at the base of it all and it’s something he can’t afford to lose.

They don’t keep it a secret from anyone, the nights they never stray away from each other’s side, but no one bothers to ask—not even on the nights where Warren declares himself too tired for the antics Hayden is trying to wrangle everyone into and starts back for his room, Nathan appearing in the doorway no more than a handful of minutes later with his jacket of the day already half-sloughed off and a heel pried from one shoe, ready to be kicked to some unknown corner of Warren’s room. Whether they put two and two together or they just already think they know what goes down behind their closed doors, Warren doesn’t know, but Victoria never barges in on them until later in the day when they could easily play it off as just hanging out and Hayden always calls before coming to drag Nathan to sit in on one of his early-morning practices, like they were aware of things that weren’t actually happening, but that neither Warren nor Nathan had bothered correcting anyone on, because no one ever asked about it, and the chance never arose.

And in the weeks that follow, things settle back down again. Nathan thaws back to himself, the wall he had thrown up slowly whittling back to reveal the foul-mouthed son of a bitch he had always prided himself on being, but with the quirked smiles and half-insults that had been missing where simmering quiet and sharp glares had taken place. Nathan comes back, and in the days past his midterms from hell, Warren again finds the chance to let himself breathe.

And life, as always, moves on.

 

* * *

 

“You’re acting weird,” Max says the third time they’ve hung out together since the funeral had taken place—the first thing she’s said to him once greeting him with a subtle wave and sitting down at their now-regular meeting place and helping herself to their now-regular pizza. Warren has the decency not to make a fool of himself, and only spares her a single raised eyebrow in what he imagines is a sleek inquiry, in no way marred by the slice of pizza half-crammed into his mouth.

Max gives him a look when he doesn’t give a verbal response. “You know you are. The fact you’re not trying to deny it already tells me I’m not just being paranoid. Don’t play me, Graham.”

Warren chews quickly and swallows. “We literally just buried a girl who’s been missing for nearly a year,” he says drily, then scrubs the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing the grease along his cheek like the classy man he was. He makes a mental note to be careful about where he puts his hands from this point on. Leaning in, he drops his voice to a whisper, “You know, the one killed by the asshole we got fucking _superpowers_ to catch?”

When Max’s eyes roll, it’s with enough exasperation to warrant a sigh she can’t make thanks to pizza, but that Warren definitely hears. He gives her a moment to consume the godly goodness that’s occupying her mouth. “I know it’s not that. You were acting hella strange _randomly_ , like you did forever ago. When you flipped from the normal, very geeky but pretty chill dude you were to the still very geeky but way less chill dude you are now. The one who has enough ants in his pants to give the certified neurotic Nathan a run for his money? Which, uh, happened literally _overnight?_ It’s weird, Warren,” she finishes with a note of decisiveness Warren knows he can’t argue, and then tacks on a meaningful look like a cherry on top.

Warren presses his lips together. They’d never talked about his sudden change—which, before this moment, he’d only guessed at anyone (barring Nathan, because Warren literally flipped his world upside down and nearly broke his door in the process that morning, so he had no choice but to know something strange was up) having noticed at all. If he was being honest, before this moment he’d assumed no one _had_ this time. A few other times, in other loops? Sure. He was terrible at hiding what the repeating time was doing to him, Max had definitely noticed at least twice when he’d been too caught up to work on his stealth skill—but this time, he’d thought he’d been in the clear.

Max shakes her head once and continues, “Something has you freaked out. And, after the personification of M. Night Shyamalan’s wet dream that we had to live through? Yeah, something tells me you aren’t acting like this because Chloe shoved you up against a door for a second and asked you if you let Rachel die to save the rest of us.”

And it’s with that—the derisive wall Max has built against any excuse Warren might have tried to conjure up to rebut her accusation—that Warren realizes he has the chance to spill it all to her. To tell her about everything he had learned—about the nightmare he had lived yet again in order to really finish it all for good. To lay out what had come and how it all was really over. To tell her the truth of their crazy story, not unlike how he had once before, on a beach just before the first warning had come floating down from the sky. Warren has the chance to bare it all to the only person who had the best idea of what he went through, to tell someone who might _actually understand_ how it all made him, someone who had lived time more than just once, feel.

The problem was—this time, he doesn’t think he can do it. He doesn’t think he can tell her. Doesn’t think he can put her through what that information might do to her.

To know everything that had happened to them was because of a girl turned god? A notion not even Warren had thought to fathom, even when he had laid down every possible speculation he could think of over and over again in an attempt to gain any small semblance of sanity to the pandemonium happening around him?

To tell her than, in essence, what had happened to them was because Rachel had wanted to save one life, but had had no idea of what she was capable of until the rabbit hole she’d created suddenly ran too deep?

That was so much for one person to handle. And Warren knew that all too well.

Besides, this time there was no _reason_ for her to know—no deaths were on the line this time around, no catastrophes or loops or life-altering events on the horizon. Town destroying natural disasters hellbent on wrecking everyone’s shit.

She didn’t  _need_ to know. And telling her could only ruin her world further. Warren wasn’t sure he wanted to be the one to do that.

And yet—she had the right to know. Because all of this had happened to her, too. And, like Warren, she’d been shoved into a position of responsibility she’d given no consent for. She had a right to know why any of this had needed to happen.

Warren sets his food down and takes a deep breath. Max must realize the sudden severity of what he wants to say, because her expression grows immediately wary, and she sets her half-eaten pizza slice down next to his.

“I know … some more information,” Warren starts slowly, his heart starting up a jackhammering behind his ribs. He clears his throat, but his voice still cracks slightly when he speaks, “About what happened to us. The powers and everything.”

Max frowns, puzzlement written all over her features. “Okaaaay,” she starts, drawing out the word. “Not what I thought you were going to say. What do you mean, more information? How could you get information all of a sudden when you spent all that time before trying to figure it out? I listen when you rant,” Max informs him when he blinks at her. Had he talked about it that much before?

Well—yeah. Okay. He definitely had. Rewind or not—it wasn’t that much of a surprise that he might have ranted a few times. What could he say? It helped him think.

“So?” Max prompts when Warren does nothing but drop both his hands on the surface of the table with a sigh. “Are you going to tell me?”

He hesitates, the argument against turning her world upside down all over again building on his tongue. He lets the silence stretch between him for a moment, and then sighs.

“It’s going to change you,” Warren explains finally, twisting his fingers through the fabric of his shirtsleeve. “Or, okay, maybe it won’t,” he offers to Max’s expression, which is somewhere between questioning and disbelieving. “A lot of shit has happened, yeah, fine. But this—this is _mind-fucking_. I didn’t see this coming, Nathan didn’t see this coming. I don’t think anyone did. Except—” he stops himself abruptly and shrugs when Max’s eyebrows raise up in question. “You can’t go back once you know this, is what I’m trying to tell you,” Warren finally settles on, and then scrubs his hand through his hair and sends it into a disarray he ignores.

“So, you’re trying to convince me to take the blue pill,” Max muses, leaning towards him with that smile that used to melt his insides, and Warren realizes, not for the first time, that he absolutely could have fallen in love with her had he been given an actual chance to.

But he knew that would never happen—not in this lifetime, and not with all they had experienced taking them on unanticipated detours through the chaos of life. Not with Chloe and Nathan and Rachel in the mix of it all, each a wrench of their own in the game they all played.

This time around, falling in love with her had never been a possibility, and he finds he doesn’t mourn the missed opportunity like he might have once before, under different circumstances.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” he replies fondly, giving her a grin in return. It withers away again after just a second of existence, and they both sober up. Max looks away, her lip catching between her teeth and her brow wrinkled up in thought.

“Would it hurt Chloe?” she asks without looking at him.

“Yeah,” he replies quietly, “I think it would.”

Max’s lips turn down, and her eyes slide back to face Warren again. He can tell from the look in them that she has an idea of what it is he doesn’t want to have to explain. “Is it something I could keep from her?” she asks, but it’s not even a question to Warren, and the answer requires no thinking.

“No.”

She puts her hands up in a shrug of defeat. “Then I don’t want to know.”

The relief Warren feels shocks him, flooding through him so viciously that he nearly slumps onto the table with it. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been dreading telling her about Rachel’s hand in everything until the moment when he knew he didn’t have to be the one to do it.

“At least not yet,” she tacks on gently, her hand reaching out to touch down on his shoulder, right where his shirt opened up to his neck, and the hint of her warm fingers against his skin jolts his heart awkwardly in his chest. He has to fight the urge to swallow obviously around the emotion as she continues, “I might change my mind when I’ve managed to accept everything. For now, though, I really just want it all to be normal for a while.”

“Understood,” he croaks, and she only smiles at him in that way she used to when he had been the boy that asked her to movies and out for pizza with barely-masked infatuation. The boy that hadn’t lived on and on where she couldn’t fathom, and never would.

He smiles weakly back at her, then scrubs both his hands over his face. “I gotta go,” he says from behind them.

“Not doing well?” she asks gently, in a way that allowed him to deny where she obviously wasn’t asking about him. He doesn’t deny it, though.

He drops his hands and gives her an unmasked look, and the easy, almost-pitying expression she wears drops instantaneously.

“What did we get ourselves into, Warren?” she asks, almost like a plea. There’s an underlying vein of humor to her question, but you wouldn’t know that from her expression alone.

Warren shakes his head. “We never had a say in it,” he mutters, and waves Max off as he turns away from her confused, suspicious look. “Call me tonight?”

“Yeah,” she agrees hesitantly, hanging on to her befuddlement. Warren feels almost guilty, because he didn’t want her to know the way he did, and Warren knew he was egging her on with that comment alone. He’d tell her when she was ready—not before. “Usual time?”

He nodded. “Usual time.”

 

* * *

 

Victoria corners him just as he’s returning to campus that same day by somehow managing to corral him to a secluded section of the school courtyard, rushing him and pinning him up against the brick wall of a building he vividly remembers hiding behind with Nathan once upon a time.

And by somehow—he means she stands in his way and snags him with an icy look that freezes him where he stands, then charges at him as if she’s the Winter Soldier on a mission until he’s scrambling backwards like a frightened animal, right into the place where she wanted him to be. He’d be impressed if he hadn’t felt like he’d just been cattle-herded to his doom.

“What did you do to him?” is the first thing out of Victoria’s perfectly-glossed lips. Warren blinks his attention away from them, too startled by the accusation to immediately try to understand it.

“What?” he responds dumbly instead, in what could only be called a yip. “Who?”

Victoria levels him with a disgusted look that is so acutely reminiscent of Nathan that Warren has to push down the sudden surge of confused feelings it gives him. He does _not_ need to be attracted to Victoria in any sense of the word. God. He had more than enough death wishes, thank you very much.

“Nathan?” he tries, which is still dumb, because who the fuck else would she mean? “What’s wrong with him? Is he okay?” Warren hadn’t seen him—or heard from him—since that morning, and he’d been with Max a good hour at least. Had something happened while he’d been gone?

His sudden alarm tacked into the second half of his inquiry must trip something in Victoria’s inner conscious (assuming she has one—sometimes Warren isn’t so sure), because she looks vaguely mollified. “He’s been spazzing,” she tells Warren, bordering on a sudden nonchalance. She looks down at her nails—which she had just released from the confines of Warren’s favorite shirt—like they held all the secrets to the questions she had for him, and then flicks her eyes back up again with a serious look. “I thought you did something to him. Or let something happen to him.”

Warren blinks. Twice. “He’s—like, now? Right now, he’s freaking out?”

“No.” Victoria rolls her eyes viciously. “Would I be _here_ if he were?”

Okay. Good point. She had a better track record than even him at being where Nathan needed, when Nathan needed. She wouldn’t be manhandling his ass if Nathan required her otherwise.

“So,” she pushes, “what is it? What happened?”

Warren’s mouth pops open with an answer he doesn’t actually have. And then, instead of giving her what she wants, he decides to continue this performance of dumbassery and ask her, “Why are you asking me and not him?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, and Victoria’s eyes narrow to slits. Warren realizes, suddenly, that he can’t run from her. She’s got him caged up against the wall without an outlet, and he’d have to knock her away to get out. Sure, he’s never seen Victoria beat anyone up before (according to Nathan, she’s much craftier about her vindication, but he also isn’t aware of that one time she’d shaken Warren to get information out of him), but he wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t be the one time she’d broken from her norm.

“It—it was just a question,” he whispers, decidedly looking away from her sharp gaze.

She continues to stare him down, her annoyingly shiny lips catching Warren’s attention each time he tries to look elsewhere, until Warren nearly decides maybe lying was his only way out of this one. Too bad he was still shit at it.

“If you’ve done anything to fuck him up,” she starts, her tone low, before Warren has a chance to do something he might regret, “or if you _do_ anything, I will _end_ you. That,” she raises one of her manicured nails and stabs it inches from Warren’s vulnerable nose, “is a promise.”

Honestly, Warren believes that more than he believes anything right now. He swallows around a lump in his throat, buying himself time before he has to speak and hoping the extra few moments would keep him from making things worse. The side of Victoria’s lips quirk up briefly in response, a startlingly Nathan-esque move that Warren again tries not to think too hard about.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Warren tells her quietly.

She waits a beat, then scoffs. “Nate might trust you enough to believe that, but I don’t.”

That stings more than Warren thinks it should, considering who she was, but Warren tries his best not to let that show on his face.

“I won’t,” he pushes, but she’s already moved away from him and turned her back.

“He’s made mistakes in the past that have really screwed him over, with things he thought he wanted.” Her shoes make pleasant tapping sounds on the bricking of the walkway as she starts to leave the area. She turns to look at him just before she’s around the corner and out of sight. “Things he thought would want him. I’m not going to let you be another one of those mistakes.”

And, with that, she’s gone, and Warren stays up against that wall, eyes on the air she leaves behind for an amount of time he doesn’t count, grimacing and clutching the fabric covering his stomach like he’d just been punched in the gut.

 

* * *

 

Nathan’s not in his room when Warren finally makes it back to the dorms (Warren checked—through convoluted methods, because Nathan still refused to give Warren access to his key), nor is he in Warren’s (which Warren is aware of immediately, because his door is unlocked, and it was only left unlocked when Nathan pilfered his key and didn’t plan on coming back until later, likely in the evening), so Warren decides now is as good a time as any to work on his campaign. Rather, now is the only good time, if he actually wanted to get anything useful out of the attempt before Nathan showed up and made the whole process basically impossible.

(It wasn’t Warren’s fault Nathan didn’t understand the mechanics of the game—nor was it his fault Nathan thought the game was stupid and didn’t want to bother learning anything about it anyway, and instead enjoyed a personal game of usurping Warren’s attention as much as possible whenever Warren tried to work on the thing.)

He’s only just got his notes re-organized ( _dammit_ , Nathan) and spread out on his floor in order of realms when his door flies open and Nathan slinks in, smelling of weed and waffles and _wet_. Warren doesn’t know if that means it’s raining outside, or that Nathan had just done something he doesn’t particularly want to know the details of.

Nathan doesn’t bother with a greeting, just barges his way in and stands expectantly in the doorway for his presence to be registered. Warren’s head snaps up when his door bursts into motion, the highlighter that had been hanging from his lips flipping into the air and landing into the floor with a muffled thud. Nathan gives to a brief look of disappointment before turning his attention into Warren again.

“Heard Vic got her hands on you,” he starts drily, walking into the room and dropping onto Warren’s bed with a muffled thump. He kicks off his shoes while Warren both shuts his door and hunts for the chucked highlighter. “Did she offer to rip off your dick and let you know what it feels like to guzzle yourself?”

Warren winces at the mental image that sentence immediately conjures up for him (he really needed to stop watching so many movies with people getting dismembered—his imagination is taking too many liberties at this point and it was concerning how easy that was), then stands back up and sets the wayward highlighter on his notebook. “No,” he responds curtly when Nathan raises his eyebrows in a bored question. “But thanks so much for that wonderful visit to the cranial cinema.”

Nathan snorts a laugh. “You’re fucking welcome.”

Warren sighs and sits down in his desk chair, leaving his notes forgotten on the floor. “You haven’t told her shit about what happened with the storm and Jefferson, have you.”

It’s a statement, not a question. Nathan’s head snaps to face Warren, something like panic quickly flitting across his features, and then he frowns and averts his gaze.

“Why would I tell her about any of that?” Nathan challenges.

A multitude of reasons rush to the forefront of Warren’s mind, all having to do somewhat with how she thought _Warren_ was the reason Nathan was acting the way he was (which, okay, he kind of was, but it wasn’t in the way she obviously thought), but instead of voicing any of them, Warren ends up saying, “Because she cares about you.”

It’s not what Warren wanted to say, but it’s better than what he could have said, and he tries to tell himself this as he watches Nathan’s face close up and turn away. “Fuck off. I don’t see you spreading the word just because someone gives a shit.”

Warren huffs. “If I went around telling people I caught Jefferson because Rachel sent me back in time to figure it out, they’d probably lock me up in the loony bin and give me a stiff white jacket to hug myself with.” That gets him a snort of amusement, and it gives him a little courage. “That’s different, anyway. Victoria just wants to know you’re okay—you’ve been acting _weird_ , dude,” Warren explains quickly when Nathan rounds on him again. His hands clutch the bedspread, the tension he doesn’t show on his face clear in the wrinkles of the fabric. “That’s what she said when she cornered me against a wall. Which, has she ever thought of being an interrogator? Or maybe a lion tamer?”

Nathan just looks at him. “Hey, Confucktor, your train of thought just went flying off the tracks.”

“Right—sorry. She’s just really good at making you feel like you’re going to get funky with a wall in all the wrong ways if you don’t tell her everything she wants to know. Which, I didn’t! Don’t look at me like that, I wasn’t going to rat everything out if you hadn’t told her, come on.”

“She knows Jefferson was a massive creep who got me caught up in his scheme. Whatthefuck else does she need to know? I’m not going to drop the whole fucking g-bomb on her.”

“I’m not saying you have to. Tell her about Rachel! _Just_ Rachel, not the god part,” Warren corrects when Nathan does him the honor of looking at him like he’s stupid. “Or—something. Just talk to her about _something_ , I don’t know. She’s worried and she thinks I’m the one messing with you.”

For a brief second, Warren could swear Nathan’s eyes widened. In alarm, shock, or something else, he doesn’t know, but he could have bet his parents’ lives that they did.

But then his eyes are their normal, squinted state when he makes a noise of irritation and rolls them. “Can you seriously not handle one person being on your shit or whatever?”

“On—what? What does that even mean?”

“So Vic doesn’t like you. What’s the big deal? I’ll tell her things when I tell her things, why can’t you just deal with someone not praising you for existing like everyone else does?”

Warren frowns. “People don’t praise me for existing. You bullied me all the time before we became friends. Also, the football team is full of assholes who don’t like me! Everyone knows that.”

Nathan scoffs, flipping Warren a quick bird. “Screw you. That’s such flaming bullshit. People like you, dipshit. They don’t think you have your head shoved so far up your ass that all you can care about is yourself.”

That gets Warren to come to a full stop. Because, with that statement, Warren understands that Nathan was jealous of how people treated him. Of how they so obviously gave Warren the benefit of the doubt, but damned Nathan before he’d had the chance to do anything worthy of it in the same beat, simply because of word-of-mouth. Sure, Nathan was a grade-A asshole and lived up to the name most of the time, but most people didn’t stop to see if it was true for themselves before deciding on their verdict. It’s an uncomfortable fact, and Warren has no idea what to do with this information.

“Yeah, exactly,” Nathan mumbles when Warren doesn’t say anything, the tension Warren hadn’t noticed easing out of the air between them. Warren decides to let Nathan win this one and slumps down in his chair in defeat. It wasn’t worth arguing anymore.

Nathan stands up from the bed, padding the short distance it was from the side of the bed to where Warren’s desk sat, and stands in front of Warren with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Warren looks up at him. He looks just as exhausted as he always did nowadays, and suddenly Warren feels like the biggest asshole to have bothered pushing the subject at all.

“I can’t talk about it yet,” Nathan says, breaking the short silence. Because of course Nathan was the one to decide when the subject would be dropped, and Warren was an idiot for ever assuming otherwise. “She’ll ask questions, she’s like a goddamn reporter with a truckload of coke in her system. And she doesn’t take no for an answer, not when it’s something like this. She never fucking shuts up and I can’t—” He stops, tilting his head back so he can growl at the ceiling. His elbow tics with movement, and Warren has to stop himself from automatically reaching out and touching it in response. “Eventually. Shit. The doc said not to get into situations that could trigger me.” Nathan’s eyes flick back down to Warren’s, and it’s clear Nathan thought little of that particular suggestion but was following it all the same. Talk about character growth.

“I guess Victoria can be pretty triggering,” Warren agrees. Nathan barks a laugh.

“I haven’t told her shit. ‘S gonna come back and nail me in the ass once I start.”

“That’s just bad tactical planning,” says Warren. Nathan just looks at him like, “Do I look like someone who ever plans before he acts?” and, yeah. Studies (specially, Warren’s studies) have shown Nathan was more of an “act now, pretend to know what you’re doing, and hope your big act gets you out okay” kind of guy than he was one to try and make sure things would work before trying them out. Which probably had something to do with the fact his family was always finding ways to get him out of the trouble he caused. Warren can’t help but remember all the times from the past where Nathan had gotten himself in deep shit with nothing more than a gun and his own big mouth.

_How on Earth did anyone ever think Nathan was cunning enough to get away with murder?_ Warren thinks suddenly, looking up at the boy in question as he stares back in silence. _He shoots himself towards the goal with minimal planning and hopes his ass doesn’t scrape the pavement on the way there._

Despite the fact Warren’s looking right at Nathan when he does it, Warren’s lost to his thought up until Nathan reaches out and flicks his finger sharply against Warren’s forehead. Warren recoils immediately.

“Hey!” he snaps, rubbing the stinging spot while Nathan laughs at his pain. “ _Ow_? What the heck!”

“How the hell did you not see that coming? You were looking right the fuck at me.”

“I was too busy imagining Victoria ripping off my dick and making me guzzle it!” Warren cries, which only makes Nathan laugh harder.

“You traumatized son of a bitch. Where the _fuck_ are your balls, Graham?”

“Shut _up_.” Warren stands up from his chair, aiming to go look at the mark he no doubt had on his forehead now and expecting Nathan to back up when he moved, but he doesn’t, and for the second time that day Warren finds himself trapped in a space he can’t easily escape from. Unlike Victoria, however, at least Nathan doesn’t look like he wants to set Warren on fire just so he can say he did.

Nathan doesn’t move and Warren’s chair only rolls a few inches away before hitting a wall, leaving them with less than a foot of wiggle room. If Warren were to lift his leg right now, he’d nail Nathan in the crotch without even needing to aim.

“Vic’s not going to do anything to you,” Nathan says before Warren can tell him to move out of the way. “She just thinks we’re fucking each other and it’s going to go Chernobyl levels of nuclear or something.”

Warren startles almost comically at the sudden information, and he tries to take a step back in his shock only for his leg to smack uselessly into his cornered chair. His face flames, and he sputters his way through a reply, “She— Oh my god, have you—you didn’t tell her— Why does she think we’re _having_ _sex_?!”

Nathan’s hand slaps over Warren’s mouth. Warren immediately grabs the wrist of it, but the hand doesn’t move. “Do you have to fucking _yell_ it? Holy mother of fuck. Use your brain, you moron. Like you do for everything else that doesn’t make a lick of shitting sense.”

Warren pulls Nathan’s hand away. “I know why she thinks it, fine. Okay! But why—Didn’t you tell her she’s _wrong_?!”

“Duh. You think she listens to me all the time? She knows I’m hiding something and apparently me being a fag is more likely to her than Rachel fucking everyone up with her death powers.”

Warren groans, rubbing his free hand along the length of his face. It’s still hot with mortification, and he wills the heat to diminish. Nathan still doesn’t move, and when Warren looks at him again, he doesn’t seem to have any distinct expression on his face towards the current subject. He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t, and they both go quiet. As the heartbeats stretch, Warren’s face slowly cools and Nathan’s arm tics once, twice in the grip Warren still has on it.

Victoria thought they were sleeping together. Great. While they certainly weren’t doing what Victoria—and likely many others, if Warren was being honest—thought they were doing, she wasn’t exactly _off_ in her assessment of the situation. Not … exactly.

… _Was_ she?

Did Warren even know what was going on here?

Stupid question. He had little to no idea what the hell was going on between him and Nathan at any given moment, and he’d always been too worried (and, really, too scared of losing what he had) to bother bringing it up. But maybe—maybe now was the time to ask, since it was already on the table.

When Warren takes a deep breath, it’s _not_ because he’s still scared. Really.

He’s not.

(He is. Just a little.)

“Obviously we’re not doing … _that_ ,” Warren starts diplomatically, his free hand rubbing the back of his neck.

“No shit.”

“Obviously,” Warren repeats. “But we’ve done, um. Other things.”

Warren isn’t imagining it when Nathan’s eyes dart down to his mouth, and he has to ignore that damn thumping his heart starts up, because now was _not_ the time. Instead, he swallows around it.

“So,” he says, unintentionally dropping to a whisper as he suddenly realizes just how close Nathan actually was. “What … are we? What is— _this_?”

A variety of emotions seem to cross Nathan’s face in the span of a couple seconds. Warren watches them but doesn’t have the brain power to decipher them right in this moment. Nathan takes a step back, and then another, his arm being released from Warren’s grip at the first inkling of a pull.

“I don’t know,” Nathan finally says once he’s created a certain amount of distance between them. His tone is a strange mix, somewhere between aggravated and—confused? Hurt? Lost? “I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“And that’s different from normal how?” Warren asks, then grunts hard from beneath a quick grin when Nathan lunges back in and socks him in the shoulder.

“Fuck off. I mean it. I don’t know what the hell to do with this.”

“This meaning us or this meaning your feelings?”

“Yes.”

Warren hesitates, any bluster he may have had when he’d first thought the question was a good idea completely gone. Without anything to hold, his hands find themselves, and his fingers twist together in the space in front of his navel nervously.

“Do you … uh, I mean.” Warren pauses, eyes on the carpet. “Do you want to stop? Doing. Um. This?”

“Would I be here if I wanted all this shit to take a dive off the deep end and die?” Nathan accuses waspishly. He’s got a point, Warren has to admit, and he does so. Nathan crosses his arms, but he doesn’t look pleased with himself like he normally did when Warren admitted he was right about something. “I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know why it has to be this big  _fucking_ deal and I don’t want to think about it and stop it just because all those assholes are trying to make it into something it might not even _be_.”

“Nathan—”

“ _What_? Are you going to tell me we have to face this? We should sit down and put a pretty fucking bow on this shit so everyone can know what’s going on with us? _I don’t know what’s going on_. I don’t! It’s not some monumental secret we all have to be in on, for the love of shit. But I don’t want to stop just because of some nosy asswipes who can’t mind their own _fucking business_.”

Nathan’s chest heaves faintly, his face screwed up with anger and his hands in fists where they’re tucked against his ribs. This isn’t what Warren wanted when he asked, and, now, he wishes he could take it back. But he can’t—all he can do is make sure he doesn’t leave Nathan high and dry, and that he knows he can accomplish.

Wordlessly, Warren raises his arms. It’s not a smooth gesture by any means—he hesitates twice in the very beginning before his hands have even left his sides and then once more when the choice to straighten his elbows out fully in the motion comes to light—but it ends with his kind-of-straight (story of his life, honestly) arms hanging in the air before him in a silent offer.

Nathan eyes him, his own arms crossed tight around his chest like he was holding something in, but it’s without the wariness he once used to use in response to everything Warren did (or tried to do) for him. Then, he takes a step, and then another, closing the space between them once more. He doesn’t uncross his arms, though, and Warren struggles on where to put his hands before deciding to cup them around Nathan’s elbows. It immediately feels stupid, but he’s made his choice.

Nathan’s close—so close, Warren can feel his breath skimming along the skin of his lips and brushing down his chin. So close, he notices immediately when Nathan’s breathing hiccups, fully betraying the expression of squinted challenge he wore on his face.

Warren can feel how his own mouth suddenly starts working, just barely, over words he doesn’t actually have to speak, and he ends up blinking stupidly in confusion, his lips still parted around whatever it is he had apparently thought he’d needed to say. Nathan’s breathing has stopped completely by this point, Warren realizes belatedly, and his eyes break from Warren’s to flick down.

_What did you do to him?_ Victoria had questioned him, her wrath palpable. And, at the time, Warren’s response of “What?” had been full of genuine confusion. Because he hadn’t noticed, at this deep of a level, that maybe he _had_ done something to Nathan, and only Victoria knew him so well as to see on that microscopic of a level. Because he hadn’t realized that, maybe, Nathan really had allowed Warren in, and it had done something to him in turn.

Nathan’s eyes flash back up and, somehow, he seems even closer than he had been just before.

“What are we?” Warren hears himself question yet again—his mouth apparently too many steps ahead of his brain to calculate a move before executing it—at so quiet a whisper that, for a fraction of a moment, he thinks _Nathan_ had been asking _him_ instead. 

Now Nathan’s mouth works, lips moving rapidly around words Warren can’t decipher, and his voice comes out like a hissing hum that is too low for Warren to really hear. He doesn’t know what it is Nathan is saying, but it’s so close to how Nathan sometimes talked to himself that immediately Warren thinks that’s exactly what it is he’s doing. The way the air pushes and puffs from Nathan’s mouth with each rushed, nearly-silent word is distracting enough that Warren finds he doesn’t _really_ care about that nugget of enlightenment from the continued mystery that is _Nathan Prescott_ —he’s too busy struggling with himself to not accidentally give into what his teenage brain is screaming at him to do.

He wants to say something, anything, but he doesn’t know where to even begin. This wasn’t where he had channeled all his skill points when he was busy becoming a human, and all the knowledge towards something like this comes from things he knows are inaccurate depictions of reality—movies, TV shows, porn. Not exactly helpful in a situation like this. Never mind the fact he certainly knew better than to break into Nathan’s current state.

In the end he doesn’t get a chance to say anything because, suddenly, Nathan’s hand is gripping his, and the force behind the surprise action startles Warren fully. He jerks out of the haze he hadn’t realized he’d been in, and Nathan’s hand grips all the tighter around Warren’s slack one, his short nails pinching sharply into the skin of Warren’s palm.

_He's close_ , Warren’s brain screams unhelpfully. _He’s so close holy shit oh my god what do I do he’s so close don’t do it don’t frick so close—_

“Warren—” Nathan murmurs, and Warren feels the shape of his name more than he hears it, but whatever it is Nathan’s going to say, it’s lost to the sound of Warren’s cell phone cleaving through the tension like a Viking with an axe.

Set to the loudest volume so Warren couldn’t miss it if Nathan called or messaged him, the ringtone blares sharply through the air like a siren, and they both startle hard enough to flinch into each other, causing Warren to knock his chin against Nathan’s teeth.

“Fuck!” Warren spits in the same moment Nathan starts a string of rapid-fire cursing from behind the hand he whips up to his mouth. He drops to the ground in a crouch, both hands cupping at his face, and Warren scrambles around him to launch himself at the floor and grab the offending piece of technology he'd left laying there on his notes. He doesn’t even look at who it is before answering it, if only to get the stupid thing to stop ringing as soon as possible.

“Hello?” Warren chokes into the receiver, and not even a beat later Nathan yells “ _Tell them to go fuck themselves_!” from behind his hands, if the slight muffle is anything to go by.

“Uh. Is this a bad time?”

Max. It’s Max. Shit. Warren hadn’t noticed the time.

“Max,” he croaks. Standing up, he staggers to his bed and drops into it. “Hi! No, it’s—this is fine. Hi. What’s up?”

“Wondering what you were doing for Nathan to tell me to go fuck myself,” she responds. She sounds amused, so Warren thinks she’s not _too_ offended.

“ _Nothing_.” His voice cracks, so he clears his throat and tries again. “Nothing. We—I forgot you were going to call and didn’t have my phone volume at an acceptable indoor level. It scared the shit out of us.”

Max laughs. “Boo.”

“Yeah, haha, still not recovered from— _hey_!” Warren grapples for the phone, which has just been plucked from his grip by Nathan, but fails completely when Nathan pushes Warren’s face away with his free hand and shoves the device up against his own ear.

“Do you have any idea how fucking bad your timing is, Cockfield?” he hisses into it, plopping onto the bed with his hand still firmly against the entirety of Warren’s face. Warren debates licking it in retaliation, but isn’t so sure he can trust where Nathan’s hand might have been. “Did I say that? No, I don’t think I did.”

Whatever it is Max is saying to him, it gets Nathan to snicker a laugh out, and Warren knows the moment his face is released that he’s lost Nathan to Max until further notice. He tries once, only once, to get the phone back, but his hand is smacked away with a cat-like reflex of a move that Nathan doesn’t look at him in order to execute. Warren huffs, cradling his hand to his chest like it actually hurt, but is ignored.

“Since when do you have one-on-one conversations with _my_ friends?” Warren mutters, knowing full well that Max was kind of friends with Nathan now, too. Nathan responds by kicking his legs up and lying back on the bed with an arm behind his head. The corner of his lip is red, Warren notices suddenly. Warren’s fault, of course. He’d been the one to knock Nathan in the teeth. Was it bleeding?

Why was it always blood and teeth with them?

Warren makes a gesture against his own lip, one that Nathan actually bothers to notice, and he responds by tonguing the cut and making a face. Warren swallows and looks away, choosing instead to return to his slightly-scattered notes before he could react to that particular action.

He gets a decent amount of time to himself to work on the campaign as Nathan chatters away to Max about things Warren doesn’t bother listening in on (during the only point he does, it sounds like Nathan is arguing about something called exposure compensation, and Warren immediately tunes back out again), but it’s clear the longer he works, the farther he’s taking this thing, and the more he’ll have to plan for it. He’ll need to tell Trevor it’s going to take more time to finish, and makes a mental note to do so the next time he sees him.

In the end, he’s so caught up working on a specific element he wants to execute for a big boss that he doesn’t notice when Nathan’s voice stops creating background noise, nor the creaking of his mattress springs as Nathan pulls himself up from the bed. So when Nathan drops down onto the floor next to him and stretches out on his stomach, Warren only spares him a blink of surprise that earns him a gratuitous eye roll. Nathan doesn’t say anything, only curls his arms and rests his head on them with his face towards Warren, everything obscured beneath them but his eyes and a hint of his nose. He’s so close that the heel of his socked foot rests on Warren’s ankle. Warren starts to set down his pen.

“No,” Nathan’s muffled voice calls out quietly. “Just keep going.”

Warren hesitates. “You sure? It’s just stupid nerdy shit.”

Nathan’s unsheltered eyes burn into Warren’s, and he hums something that could be taken a multitude of ways. But Warren knows it’s meant to be a noise of absolution, that Nathan had said what he’d said, and the fact Warren wasn’t following was the problem of the matter here. So, Warren turns back to his notes and maps and stats while Nathan watches quietly on, his foot jiggling against the carpet in a gesture Warren only has to stop him from making in favor of another (tapping his fingers against his arm) once.

And eventually, he falls asleep like that, pen clutched loosely in his fingers and papers pressed against his cheek in a way that will no doubt leave marks that won’t wash away easily, one arm slung away from his face to nestle under the warm curve of Nathan’s. It’s not the most comfortable of positions he’s ever fallen asleep in, and any particularly large movement would surely wake him up.

But he doesn’t wake up even once, and has to face his ink-stained regrets come morning. It’s a small price to pay, he decides as he’s scrubbing his skin raw with a washcloth at the sinks while Nathan elbows Hayden on his way into the shower, for the ease of the night he was granted. And it was one he’d absolutely pay again if he could.


	12. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this really wasn't necessary to the story, honestly, but it was formerly part of chapter 11 before it got away from me (REALLY got away from me) and I didn't really want to cut the scenes out, so I didn't. we'll commence with what is basically the remaining dregs of the plot next chapter (I think), but, for now, here's this.

“I kissed Nathan,” Warren blurts out during the final school day before break started—a day where they were free to do whatever they wanted while everyone who was leaving campus waited to go home for the holidays—effectively derailing whatever Max had been about to comment to him about the chemical project he’d been explaining to her just three words before. Where the confession comes from, Warren actually, wholly and honestly doesn’t have a shitting clue. They had been talking chemical compounds, with Warren showing Max a particular combination he was working on for fun with Ms. Grant’s blessing, and then, out of nowhere, Warren had dropped _that_ bomb. It’s so sudden in its appearance that even he can’t help but blink in a stunned silence at his own action.

He hadn’t even thought to make sure the coast was clear before spewing that out for anyone in the vicinity to hear. What was he, some lovesick teenage idiot all of a sudden? Jesus  _Christ_.

Max looks up at him owlishly for a heartbeat before the expression is blinked away in favor of her usual nondescript resting face. “Finally,” is all she says, and then starts making a pun about the sodium.

“You— _finally_?!” Warren parrots back in astonishment, cutting off the pun almost at its crux. That must be when Max realizes he’s being genuine in his shock, because normally he would _never_ ruin a good pun.

She frowns at him, then raises both her eyebrows in an exaggerated look. “You couldn’t cut that sexual tension with that thing they use to cut diamonds, Warren.”

He can’t help but continue to gape at her. “The— Oh no. No, _no_ , no.” Max leans away as Warren sweeps his arms out like he was trying to physically reject what she was telling him. “ _No_. No, no. Nuh uh. No. Nope. Sexual tension? _What_ sexual tension? There is no sexual tension between me and Nathan freaking Prescott! I reject your notion, this is a scientific implausibility. Objection!”

“Overruled. I’m pretty sure you’re the only one denying it,” Max says after a pause. “Well,” she amends quickly, “and probably Nathan. But hells no am I ever actually asking him, not even for the sake of science. Doesn’t mean we’re not all aware it’s there!”

Warren immediately thinks of Victoria—and of what _she_ thought he and Nathan were doing. He groans into his palms, rocking back on his stool to an almost dangerous degree. Max’s quick hands steady him when he nearly slides off the seat from the overcompensating sort of flailing he does when he suddenly thinks he’s falling. “‘Never be certain of anything,” he says gravely once his butt is firmly seated once again. “It’s a sign of weakness.’”

Max looks thoughtful. “Fifth Doctor?”

“Fourth,” Warren corrects, mocking hurt. “Fifth would never.”

“Aren’t they all technically the same person?”

“That’s besides the point.”

Max leans down to cup her chin in her hand, and then watches him. “The point is that you and Nathan have a thing and have had the potential for that thing for months now. You’re with him all the time, you can’t honestly tell me you don’t see the way he looks at you.”

“Like he wants me to shut up and is fighting the will to smash my face in?”

“Like he wants to shut you up himself and the only smashing that will be happening is a result of that, what now? Say it with me. _Sexual tension_.” Max reaches out and pats his arm. “You’re both horrifically horrendous at hiding your feelings.”

Warren glowers into the sulfur dioxide. She would know, too, and he was painfully aware of that fact. “Yeah, well. We must be better than you think, because we’re obviously not a thing. It’s not like there’s been a lot of room to go pouring my heart out. Like I said, it’s Nathan freaking Prescott. He always raises more questions than he ever answers, and he never answers any of them!”

“Wait.” Max frowns, a thought seemingly coming to her. “When did you kiss him exactly?”

“While ago. I don’t know, it was before Rachel’s funeral.”

“That was almost three weeks ago.”

Warren shrugs. “Then it was almost three weeks ago.”

“You haven’t talked about it with him?”

Warren looks at her. It’s like they aren’t talking about the same person or something. “You think I haven’t tried? Nathan. Freaking. _Prescott_.”

“Warren,” Max starts in exasperation. She pushes herself up onto her elbows, giving her enough height so that she can be somewhat level with his eyes. “Don’t beat around that bush. You’re a smooth-talker, you’re good at worming your way into things you want. You have to get him to talk to you about it—or at least let you talk to him about it,” she corrects quickly when Warren starts to open his mouth again, “so you don’t sit around and end up doing fat shit about it at all.”

“All right, I get it, I know,” he relents, then squints at her. “Why do you seem so confident about the fact I won’t go pushing it on my own? I can be assertive!”

“Experience,” Max says simply.

Warren winces. “Okay, fair enough.” He pauses long enough to swirl one of the combinations in its beaker, sliding it over Max’s way when she requests a look. “I’ll do what I can, but he’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. It’s like trying to coax a Vulcan to tap dance.”

Max laughs, and Warren takes a moment to enjoy the sound. “Yeah, can’t say I don’t agree there. He’s even more stubborn than you, which I never thought I’d be saying, Nathan Prescott or otherwise.”

“What? I’m not stubborn.” Max just looks at him, and if the pout he gives her is only partially feigned, no one in particular needs to know that. “Fine. I’m _kind of_ stubborn. But Nathan takes stubborn to a whole new level, and you can’t argue that.”

Max snorts. “I wasn’t. I agreed with you. You just hate the fact I called you stubborn along with him.”

“Because Nathan’s ability to be that stubborn is an insult in itself and I hate it like the Savior hates figs.”

Max opens her mouth and holds it for a moment. “Jesus hates figs?”

“We’ve got to get you online more,” Warren says, placing a hand on her shoulder and shaking his head sadly. He makes a mental note to send her that one ASAP. “This ‘fresh air’ bullshit is ruining your brain.”

Max snorts. “It’s probably the developer, actually.” She hesitates as Warren starts eyeing the beaker to his left, which has started to bubble, a thoughtful expression to the way she purses her lips. “Maybe he’s waiting for you to decide what you mean.”

Warren turns his attention back to her. “Well, considering _I_ kissed _him_ , I think it’s pretty obvious what I want us to mean.” And besides, Warren had been the one who asked Nathan what they meant. It could have been too soon, sure, but it _had_ been weeks. That was a long time when the world had been falling apart not even two months before.

“But you didn’t put it in words?” Max pushes.

“I used my mouth in other ways. I thought my point went across pretty okay.”

Max makes a puking noise, her shoulders hunching up to her ears. “Augh. Gross, Warren. I don’t need to know that many details about what you two get up to—”

“ _No_!” Warren nearly shouts, wincing when someone stops in the doorway of the classroom to stare at him incredulously from the hallway. He waves them off with one hand as he drops his voice to a whisper, “I only kissed him. That’s all I meant. I thought that was plenty, movies always make it seem like it’s a decent non-verbal declaration.”

“You’re relying on movies for your point of reference when it comes to romance?” Max questions him flatly and, okay, once again, she had a point.

Warren sighs and slumps down on the table, pushing the beakers far enough from his reach and ignoring the way his brain immediately tells him how unsanitary that was, especially when he’s handling chemicals. What Ms. Grant didn’t see couldn’t kill her. Max’s hand touches down on his back in a comforting pat.

“I think you just have a lot in store for you when it comes to Nathan,” Max informs him gently. _Understatement of the century_ , Warren doesn’t say back, and she continues on unaware of his snark. “So, hey, we’re going to the drive-in tonight, since I have to leave tomorrow. You wanna tag in?”

Warren turns his head to the side so he can see her. “Does the Pope wear Prada?”

Max hesitates. “Y...es?” she tries tentatively.

“Yes. The answer is yes. How cold is it supposed to be tonight?”

“Pretty damn.”

“Your innovative methods of measurement never cease to amaze me.” Warren sighs, pulling himself up into a sitting position again. “Okay. I’ll just dress like I’m planning on a new Ice Age to spontaneously envelop us while we’re busy gorging ourselves on carbs and corn byproducts we won’t even digest properly.”

Max frowns, tilting her head in consideration. “Is popcorn a corn byproduct or is it just … corn?”

“Hm,” Warren muses. “Okay, yeah, maybe don’t quote me on that one. Probably not, if they etymology is anything to go by, but that stuff’s always really tricky because of standards. I’ll Google it later.”

“Why are humans so weird?” Max asks after a moment.

“Evolution,” Warren declares with a tone of finality, then starts to clean up. Max helps him, and when they’re done he slides from his seat and ushers Max out of the classroom like he was presenting a belle to a ball. It gets her out of the room fairly quickly, which is fine by him. He needed to change, for one thing, and run the night by Nathan for another. It might be a few hours before he left, but he had no idea where Nathan even was right now, so he wanted to give himself all the time he could.

 

* * *

 

Like clockwork, they meet Chloe at the crossroads (okay, cross _paths_ , whatever) where the main building path split to accommodate a variety of life choices, and Chloe greets Warren by socking him on the arm none-too-gently and gleefully demanding he attend the self-titled soiree she was throwing together at the drive in as they meandered their way into the dorms.

“And feel completely free to leave that doucheknuckle leech you call a friend behind when you join us,” says Chloe as she pushes her way into the boy’s side of the dormitories before Warren can question her reasoning.

“Doucheknuckle,” Warren repeats instead of telling her the truth, that he was going to at least tell Nathan what he was going to be doing that night, and anything that happened thereafter was not Warren’s responsibility (because, seriously, if anyone can control Nathan it’s not Warren—that would under Victoria’s domain, thank you) and he should therefore not be blamed for what might come from said acknowledgement. Chloe knew as well as anyone else that Warren and Nathan were basically joined at the hip at this point, so obviously Nathan was going to question Warren’s whereabouts when he erred on the side of spontaneity. “Somehow, that’s a new one for the books.”

Max elbows Chloe gently. “Looks like Prickscott’s getting some competition as the wordmash champion.”

Chloe’s face scrunches up in displeasure at this, but before she can offer anything by ways of verbal reaction, a voice calling out brings the overall attention away from the subject at hand.

“Warren!” is specifically what the voice in question calls, and Warren’s gaze zeroes in on the form of Dana jogging his way with Trevor trailing behind. “Can we talk a sec?”

“Hey,” Warren greets them both, Chloe and Max offering her waves when she comes to a stop in front of them, Trevor still a few steps behind and looking sheepish. “Just a second? For you, I’ll give a whole minute! What’s up?”

Warren can see Chloe miming a gagging motion out of the corner of his eye, but Dana smiles at him. “Trev was telling me about that big game you’re got brewing up in your lair and how you’re going to throw a—what did you call it?” She turns to address Trevor, who, seemingly despite himself, lights up attentively for a split second before remembering he was apparently supposed to be projecting some other sort of emotion Warren hadn’t managed to puzzle out yet. “Concession?”

“Campaign,” Trevor corrects. “Or session, I guess.”

“That.” Dana turns back to Warren again, her ponytail swishing behind her. “I combined the words. Anyway, Trevor is all excited about it, bringing it up with Justin and the guys, and I’ve never seen him bat an eye at those guys who play it on the lawn sometimes. So I thought: I need to get in on this! Yeah, it’s totally not up my alley and maybe my cred will take a little bit of a hit, but bonding moments come in the weirdest packages, y’know? You can’t just let them pass you by! If he wants to do it, I want to give it a try, too.”

Warren blinks at her, rapidly trying to process what she was saying to him in a way that he could actually comprehend. _Dana_ and _Dungeons and Dragons_ just didn’t want to bond in his brain as a coherent prospect. “So,” he tries with little less than a beat of hesitation once he’s pretty sure he’s got the basic gist of it, “you want to join the campaign?”

Dana beams at him, bouncing her head once in a confirming nod. From behind her, Trevor gives him an apologetic wince of a grin. Warren’s not sure why, because it’s not like he was going to say no to a girl like Dana joining something _he_ was creating. Plus, Trevor was his friend, and friends could bring girlfriends if they wanted to. He wasn’t about to start gatekeeping.

“Uh,” he replies intelligently, still a little dumbstruck over the simple fact Dana wanted to join at all. “Um—no—yeah! That’s cool. I’ve never—that’ll make a huge group if—and, wow, I—we can do it!” he says, raising his hands in front of them and waving them like they could dispel the disappointed look that sprung to Dana’s face the moment he unintentionally rejected her in his attempt to convey his thoughts on the matter. “I’ll just need a little longer. It needs more fleshing out, you know? More people, bigger storyline, better bosses. I don’t want you guys slaughtering my story in just a few hours of game time.”

“Are you sure?” Dana asks gently, giving Warren a chance to think of a way to tell her no. She was always such a nice person, Warren remembers with a little twinge of guilt he doesn’t want to think too deeply about. “I can sit in and watch.”

“No, no! Hell no! It’ll be more fun with more people.” Warren mines the all-binding X of a sworn promise over his chest. “Swear it. Just give me time to tweak things. Do you know how to make a character?”

“I think I can manage,” she says and winks. Warren grins back.

“Sweet. I’ll add you to the plans.”

“Thank you!” sing-songs Dana and then she’s enveloping Warren in a hug that effectively short-circuits his brain right where it sits in his skull. He can hear the second Trevor starts barking a laugh at his hesitation before even attempting at returning the hug, but anything actually being said right in that second fails to penetrate the hum that’s started up between Warren’s ears as he tries his hardest not to let his hormones wreck potential havoc on his thought process, once it bothered to start up again.

Luckily for him, he doesn’t have the chance to really attempt at trying for anything at all when his name echoes down the length of the boy’s dorm hallway yet again, this time in the sharp voice of someone with a far more masculine (and—offended?) tone than Dana had offered, and in the form of his surname rather than his given.

“ _Graham!_ ” is the bark that breaks the good humor all around the group, and Warren yanks himself away from Dana’s embrace before his hands even have a chance to do more than touch her back. He throws them up in the air without realizing what he’s doing.

“Nothing!” he yelps.

Everyone winces away, and Warren realizes just how loud he’d yelled that. He tries to give them all an apologetic smile and shrug, but he stops short when Nathan—having both materialized out of nowhere and been the one to call out Warren’s name—smacks him on the shoulder.

“You broke the fucking sound barrier, holy shit,” he accuses. He’s rubbing his ear like Warren could have seriously damaged it, which is ridiculous in itself.

“I—sound barrier? You don’t break the sound barrier with— That’s _speed_ , Nathan,” Warren tells him, and from beside him Dana gives a minute nod. “You break the sound barrier by going fast, not with decibels.”

Nathan just squints. “Then why the fuck to they call it a _sound_ barrier?”

“Because it’s the barrier, or cap if you want to use even simpler terms I guess, of speed that sound travels, and— _mgh_.”

“Okay, you got your point across there, we don’t need an elaboration of that shit,” Nathan commentates helpfully, and Warren huffs into the hand Nathan had placed over his mouth. Without removing it, Nathan turns to throw suspicious looks first at Dana and Trevor, then at Max and Chloe. Chloe returns it, while the other three just act as if Nathan wasn’t trying to nonverbally accuse them of something they probably didn’t do.

“Soooo,” Trevor drawls when a moment has passed. His hands are deep in the pockets of his jeans, and he looks uncomfortable with the situation. “We cool?”

It’s directed, obviously, at Warren, but Nathan either doesn’t understand that or—the more likely choice—doesn’t care, because he speaks up before Warren has a chance to both remove Nathan’s hand and speak himself, “Not on your pathetic excuse of a life, dickblossom.”

Dana rolls her eyes. She must have balls of steel hidden in those skin-tight jeans of hers, because she reaches right out and removes Nathan’s hand from Warren’s mouth, dropping it from her tentative grip as soon as its lost skin contact and Warren can easily move away. Nathan’s hand balls into a fist and he bristles at her, his mouth opening up to say god knows what, when Warren blurts out in a desperate attempt to save everyone from a potential atomic bomb of a reaction, “Just text me if you need any help! Trevor has my number. And keep me updated on that character creation so I know what kind of background to build for!”

“Will do. It’ll be a party!” Dana replies, all smiles and genuine excitement as she blatantly ignores Nathan’s aggressive stare, and then she hooks an arm around both Max and Chloe and turns on a heel to vacate the premises, nearly dragging both the girls along with her in a way that somehow nearly looked natural thanks to the way she seemed to have her head bent to them conspiratorially as they left. Trevor offers Warren a half-shrug of indeterminate emotion before trailing after the three, and Warren is left clutching the elbow of one fired-up Nathan in an attempt to hopefully dissuade any potential for a one-person manhunt.

Balls of steel? No. Balls of pure fucking _chromium_ , Warren decides. Dana was definitely not someone to mess with, disposition of a sugar plum preschool teacher or not.

“Let me go, Graham,” Nathan growls without taking his eyes off of the shutting door of the boy’s dorms. He’s not pulling or anything, not even really acting like he wants to bother going after them, so Warren decides it’s all for show and follows the request. Nathan shakes out his arm once and rounds on Warren, eyes narrows. “The fuck was that about?”

“Dana’s joining the session,” Warren explains immediately, because what was he going to do, lie?

Nathan looks genuinely taken aback. Whatever he’d thought had been going on before he’d arrived, that apparently wasn’t it. “What? No fucking way. She’s way too hot to be playing that shit.”

Wow, okay. _Rude_. Warren really wants to commentate on that, but he knows it’ll take him places he doesn’t think he’s equipped to handle right in this moment, so he bites his tongue and pushes the urge away.

“Lots of people play Dungeons and Dragons, dude,” Warren starts instead, allowing more than just a smidgen of exasperation to seep into his tone as he turns away from Nathan and goes for his own room. “It’s not all neckbeards and forty-year-old virgins like the movies try to make you think.”

“I don’t believe that as far as I can throw your candy ass,” Nathan replies from directly behind Warren, telling him he’d wasted no time in following. Like Warren expected any different.

“Uh, hello? Do I look like a neckbeard to you?”

Nathan snorts. “You have the face of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“Beside the point, Nathan.” Even if it was kind of true. Warren doesn’t think Nathan can talk—not with skin that smooth. Plus he’s only seen him shave, like, twice. “Point is, I’m not one. And I’m obviously not a forty-year-old virgin—”

“Yet.”

Warren just gives Nathan a look from where he’s about to go closet-diving for a change of clothes. Nathan gives him a shit-eating grin and drops into Warren’s desk chair, ankle flipping up to rest on his opposite knee. Warren found he kind of hated how naturally cool that made him look.

“The point, _Prescott_ , is that we are firmly outside that cliche bracket.”

“We?” Nathan parrots back, affronted. “There’s no _we_ in this.”

Warren rolls his eyes as he tosses his shirt of choice onto his bed before going back in for a new pair of jeans. His current ones smelled like chemicals. “Fine. We meaning me, Dana, Trevor, Max, Chloe, etc.”

Nathan suddenly goes quiet, and he’s got his eyes on the floor and his lips pressed into a thin line when Warren dares a look at him. Warren’s on the bed and tossing away his old shirt and jeans in favor of the new ones when Nathan finally speaks again, “Why the hell are those dweebs playing?”

“Max and Chloe?” Warren asks, surprised. He thought he’d mentioned he was doing a test run with them. “They want to help. I have to make sure the campaign can work with the boss levels I want before I get the whole group involved. I don’t know if they’re staying for the main play, but Max offered her services, and where there’s Max, there’s Chloe.”

There’s a pause that Warren uses to shuffle his jeans onto his legs and flop onto his bed for his shirt, and then Nathan claps his hands together once. Warren jumps at the sharp noise, nearly throwing his shirt across his room. “I’m in,” Nathan declares, like there was any debate on the matter in the first place and this was the final decision.

“You’re in … what?” Warren asks slowly, more for solid clarification than because he doesn’t understand what Nathan is saying.

“Your little game thing. I’ll play.”

Warren frowns at him, picking up his shirt again absentmindedly and snapping it out. _Kind of_ wrinkled wasn’t a fashion felony, right? Whatever. He didn’t actually care, and it was a shirt. It was going under a jacket for what would likely be the entirety of the night. No one, besides Nathan, was going to see it. “What do you mean, you’ll play? You think the whole thing is stupid. You literally just said so not even ten minutes ago. Why do you want to play now?”

“I’m sorry,” Nathan says acidicly instead of answering, levelling Warren with a gaze that could freeze the marrow in his bones if he looked directly into it, “did I fucking stutter there, dorko?”

Warren huffs and looks away, presenting Nathan with his full bare back as he wrestles his shirt right-side out to be donned. That _is trust_ , he’ll later think. _You don’t turn your back on someone you think will stab it._

“Fine,” Warren relents. “You’ll help me test with Max and Chloe. Make a character.”

Nathan gives a derisive snort at that order. “Bitch, you make it. I’m too busy to be nerding it out over crap like that. I have better ways to waste my precious time.”

“Yeah, _busy_. You’re definitely not too hot for it,” Warren throws back in a pantomime of Nathan’s earlier declaration concerning Dana, then freezes with his change of shirt bunched into his fists as the air in the room stills.

Nathan always had a weird way of being able to do that—like the moment _he_ stopped moving, everything else around him did too. Maybe that was why he was always moving, always shaking a limb or tearing something to bits. It was a stillness Warren could do more than just hear happening behind him and around him—he could feel it settling into his bones, and he almost wishes he hadn’t tried Nathan’s patience right then and there.

And to think, his sense of self-preservation used to be _phenomenal_. Then he went and got involved with Nathan, and in more ways than just the one it used to be.

(He can blame himself for that one, though, because it’s not Max’s fault he liked her and wanted to defend her. The rest—well. Nathan liked him enough now that everything was said and done that he didn’t have to worry _too_ much about the significant loss of his inherent ability to maybe not go looking for trouble at every turn.)

(Well. Mostly.)

It’s barely more than a few splits of a second, really, but it feels like forever before Nathan springs back into motion, and Warren’s lips break into a pleased smile before he can think to stop himself.

The creak of his desk chair and muffled thump of footsteps on the carpet tells Warren of Nathan’s approach, and Warren instinctively curls in on himself with that a snark of a grin splitting his face, shoulders hunched and ready for Nathan to whip him around and realize Warren was giving him a taste of his own medicine for shits and giggles. That, or shove him forward into the bed, like he sometimes did when he wasn’t taking Warren seriously in the first place anyway.

But neither of those things happen when the footsteps stop, the radiated warmth against Warren’s bare back an easy indicator that Nathan had, indeed, walked the short length of the space between his desk and his bed over to do something to Warren for his cheek. Though Nathan had always been a relatively equal mix of reprise and chaos when it came down to his actions and emotions—something Warren had grown nothing short of completely used to over the time they’d spent together—Warren found he could still be rendered to utter bafflement by some of the things Nathan would do or say, no matter how much he thought he knew him. Now, _of course_ , was not going to be the exception.

Where Warren had expected hands along his shoulders, gripping tight and firm with the strength needed to maneuver him either forward or around, instead a single hand touches down lightly against the back of his neck. First the heel of a palm, if the slight pressure of fingertips against the base of his hairline was any indication of how the limb was situated, and then the whole of the hand all at once, pressing cold into the skin. Nathan’s hands had a tendency to be colder than any other part of him, and the chill of it now caused Warren’s entire torso to come alive with goosebumps.

 _A push_ , Warren’s brain offers by way reasoning for Nathan’s action, concluding a new method for an old act, but his body doesn’t follow along with the deduction. He doesn’t do anything, and Nathan’s hand pulls away again until it’s nothing but the touch of two fingertips against the arc of his atlanto-occipital joint.

Warren doesn’t move. Neither does Nathan—at least, not immediately. Not until Warren has the chance to think maybe nothing was going to happen at all. Then, with a twitch that almost removes the contact of their skin completely, Nathan’s fingers spring into action.

Nathan’s hand trails along the line of Warren’s spine slowly, fingers pressing divots into the notches between the vertebrae one by one as he scaled down the length of curving bones, and Warren’s heart stutters erratically in his chest with every inch Nathan traverses until he isn’t breathing at all and his mind is nothing but a fuzz of white noise.

Then, as suddenly as he had approached, Nathan is gone again, and Warren tries his best not to visibly start sucking air back into his lungs like he so desperately needed to right in that moment. His head swims with a variety of emotions, but his brain can’t seem to pick any one of them up in its short-circuited state.

It takes him a long time—too long, he knows, but he can’t help it—to get his thoughts in order again. He pulls his shirt over his head slowly, swallowing drily around a lump that refuses to leave his throat.

When he finally looks behind him—Nathan is gone. Warren finds that fact doesn’t make it any easier to breathe.

 

* * *

 

Nathan doesn’t resurface before Warren leaves campus, crammed between Kate and Max as they carpool over in Chloe’s truck (the best option for viewing the movies with, because of how big the bed was), so Warren sends him a text warning him of his locked bedroom door and of where he’ll be for the night that Nathan doesn’t end up answering. If that weren’t such a normal occurrence, Warren would bother to be worried about it. But it is, and there’s no reason to. So he doesn’t.

He spends the car ride mostly bonding with Kate over a myriad of rabbit facts, him exchanging one for every story she tells him about her pet, and he’s left with her and the stash of blankets and pillows once they arrive, Chloe and Max charged with the gathering of snacks and beverages before the movies got started for the night. Being the taller of the two, Warren works mostly from the side of the truck while Kate works from within the bed of it, and they make something resembling a tolerable situation to spend long hours sitting in, even with the increasingly cold wind threatening to make the show a no-go. It’s not quite cold enough for the event to be cancelled, but Warren starts shivering despite his mostly-warmer threads just as they’re finishing up. Declaring it done, Kate waves him in and requests he check it out for himself.

She tosses one of the blankets to him before he can start his climb and he pulls it over his shoulders rightly as he scrambles into the bed of the truck, catching the very toe of his shoe on the lip just as he thinks he’s home-free. _That’s what you get for not using both of your hands you dumbfuck_ , a voice that sounds distinctly like Nathan chastises while Warren’s mid-trip.

“ _Ack!_ ” he yelps as he stumbles in, one hand, and then the other, flying out to catch himself on the window before he can fall on Kate, who just so happens to be sitting precisely in the way of his tumble.

(Of course, because they both just seemed to have that kind of luck. He’d blame Rachel if he didn’t already think she was busy with a different set of relationships to push. That, and the fact he’s still pretty sure she controls time and only time. God help them all if she had the powers of Cupid—but Warren doesn’t think that’s the case.)

Warren blanket flies from around his shoulders to pool in the space beside Kate as he falls, a traitor to the cause. Her hands whip up to press firmly up against his chest, half-catching him and half to shield herself from the danger of his bodily onslaught, and Warren finds himself in what could only be the most awkward of situations he could possibly think of being in, arched over the entirety of Kate’s curled form with his face close enough to her hair for him to smell it.

Yeah, okay. Not weird at all, thank you very much.

“Um,” he starts, then swallows like he’s in a bad romcom.

“Are you okay?” Kate asks him just as he’s rushing out, “Crap, sorry, I’ll—”

He stops abruptly, feeling the warmth of a blush creep up his neck, and starts to push himself up, only for his grip on the window to start dangerously slipping. His legs aren’t long enough to reach the end of the bed, because of course Chloe had to have an oversized monster of a truck with a bed that was longer than Warren was tall, whatever the hell the brand was. He couldn’t tell half the time even when he was looking at the emblems. Cars weren’t exactly his forte.

Kate, her hands still steady against his chest, laughs. She probably felt him slipping as he tried to get up. “Are you stuck?”

“Little,” he mumbles out, then grins when she laughs harder. “I’m gonna need some elbow grease to get out of this one alive. Give me a push?”

Kate looks dubious and concerned, glancing at the space Warren had to catch himself if she did push him up, but seems to find no other way of helping him and relents. “On three?”

Warren nods. He shifts his weight as much as he can into his feet and braces himself for the shove. “One…” he starts slowly.

“Two…”

“Wow. I knew I was going to see some weird shit going down if I decided to come here, but you serving shitass moves to Marsh was not in my realm of expectations. Fuck me for that one.”

Warren’s head whips to the side and, lo’ and behold, Nathan’s standing next to the truck with his arms crossed and an unmistakable look of annoyance on his face.

“Nathan!” Kate waves in greeting, and Warren realizes after a moment that Kate’s other hand is already in her lap. He didn’t even notice her removing them from his chest in the first place. “You came! Max and Chloe are getting snacks, and Stella isn’t here yet. We’re not totally sure she’s coming, actually.”

One of Nathan’s eyebrows arches up. “The hell? You didn’t tell me you were going to a pussy party. Where was my invite?”

Kate’s eyes dart away, obviously uncomfortable with Nathan’s choice in vocabulary. Warren drops his head and huffs, forgetting completely in that second his proximity to Kate’s bun, and her gaze turns up towards him. “Sorry,” he tells her quickly before turning to Nathan again. “I’m always with the girls, dude,” he points out. “The only guy I ever go here with is you, you know that. The rest of my movie-appreciating friends are girls. And you _left_ before I could tell you anything.”

Nathan looks thoughtful beneath his annoyance, but before he can open his mouth and offer commentary on that, Kate speaks up, “Warren’s stuck. He fell trying to get in and, well. Here we are. Could you help him get up?”

Nathan looks at her a long moment, then switches his line of sight to Warren and makes a big show of rolling his eyes and sighing like he’d just been given a great burden he didn’t want. With one hand on the lip of the truck bed, Nathan hauls himself up and in, the truck shuddering with his added weight, and then grabs Warren by the neck of both his shirt and his jacket in one fist and yanks.

Hard.

“GHU—!” is all Warren gets out as he stumbles back and nearly flips over and out the back of the truck with the momentum, only to be grabbed and steadied by Nathan only after his life had a chance to start flashing before his eyes.

“Whoops,” Nathan offers drily as Warren flails his arms into a locked position around Nathan’s torso. “Don’t know my own strength.”

“Screw you,” Warren wheezes into his ear. Nathan flinches minutely and knocks his knee into the back of Warren’s to dislodge him, then shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket and cocks his head to look around Warren at Kate.

“You wish,” he breathes like an afterthought, transitioning seamlessly into a normal speaking tone to ask Kate, “Chick-flick or thriller trip?”

“I think it’s a real mix tonight,” Kate replies without missing a beat, procuring one of the printed fliers they’d picked up upon entering to hand him. Accepting it, Nathan squints down at it wordlessly, and Kate waits patiently for him to read it. “The theme is just Christmas, they’re going all across the board,” she explains when he gives her a look that’s part confusion, part disgust, and all _Prescott_.

“ _Edward Scissorhands_ is on here,” he replies flatly.

Kate gives him a shrug and a smile. “Technically, it’s got Christmas in it.”

“Howthefuck is that even a thing,” Nathan mumbles back, but it’s clear from both his tone and the shift in attention back to the list that the question is rhetorical, so neither Kate nor Warren answer him.

It was strange, Warren thinks for a moment, how _different_ Kate’s and Nathan’s interactions had the potential to be without _That Party_ existing in their shared past. He wasn’t nice to her—not exactly, because this was _Nathan_ —but he wasn’t the complete platitude of assery that Warren was fully aware he could have been had Warren not stepped in and told him what would come from the eventual Vortex party prank.

Would that have stopped him in another life, after the time where he was coming to a breaking point and was on the precipice of absolutely losing it, Warren doesn’t know, because he’d never had the chance to try it. He’d put everything in that first moment he’d confronted Nathan about everything, and it had turned out to be the right decision. Had it not, would Warren have tried doing so again at a different moment? Or would he have scrapped the idea altogether?

He doesn’t know, didn’t know, would _never_ know, and tearing himself up over wondering the possibilities that would never be was a useless endeavour. And he knew that.

The point here, he tells himself to get away from that track, was that Nathan was not a full-on dick to Kate like Warren knew he could be. Still not _nice_ —civil was maybe the better word, like it was in most cases. He had civil moments at the very most when it came to Kate specifically, but he also never threw the same cruel things at her that he would have in another life. For Kate—judging by the way she still interacted with him, if only when she had little choice but to based on company—it was enough. Warren wasn’t to go pushing for more if he didn’t have to. Pushing Nathan Prescott rarely ended well for anyone, and who he could have become was only further proof of that statement. He wasn’t about to put Kate through something like that, either. He’d seen enough of her suffering, and he never wanted to live to see it again if he was being honest with himself.

“I’m really glad you’re still here, Kate,” Warren tells her quietly, suddenly, before he can think to stop himself. The look Nathan throws at him from just next to him is full of befuddlement and alarm, the paper clutched in the tightening grip of his fingers the only real betrayal of how the statement affected him, but Kate only smiles at Warren quizzically.

“ _Still_ here?” she repeats with a lightly teasing tone, like she was assuming Warren had done nothing more than make a grammatical error. But Warren’s response comes a beat too late not to _feel_ wrong.

Realizing his mistake, Warren chokes a cough into his fist. “I mean—that you’re—uh—yeah. You know what I mean,” he corrects blithely, then gives her a weak smile. “I’m glad you’re around?”

The confused smile she’d been giving him drops in favor of further confusion, and then, just for a few heartbeats, her eyes widen and the blood drains from her face all at once. She looks as if she’s about to say something when Nathan appropriately interrupts, and Warren is saved from whatever Kate has been about to say to him.

“I fucking knew it,” Nathan hisses suddenly, tearing Warren’s attention away from the growing look of bloodless confusion that was starting to overtake Kate’s features completely, and Warren looks in the direction Nathan is facing to see Chloe and Max approaching the truck with a multitude of snacks in plastic bags and entwined hands in the space between their hips. In an attempt to look like he hadn’t just fallen down a mental rabbit hole, Warren tries to give him a “duh” look—because _duh, where has he been_ —but Nathan’s too busy staring at the girls to notice it. They don’t drop hands when they get closer, but Chloe’s expression dares Nathan to say anything. He only huffs haughtily and crosses his arms, staring down at them from the truck bed in growing silence. Even Kate doesn’t say anything, so Warren decides it’s his time to shine.

“They grow up so fast,” he says wistfully, wiping away a fake tear, and Nathan thwacks him upside the head with the half-crumpled paper. It breaks the atmosphere, though, because both Kate and Max give it a laugh, and Chloe’s lips split into a grin as she starts handing up her bag of goodies. Warren takes them, handing them back to Kate, and then holds out a hand each for the girls to take. Nathan mutters something Warren doesn’t catch as he moves out of the way, but Warren ignores him in favor of making sure he doesn’t fall out of the truck himself when they both take his hands at the same exact time.

“All right,” Chloe says, clapping her hands together once she’s firmly in the truck and Max has a blanket over her shoulders, the rest of the blankets and pillows piled in and around the two folding chairs behind her. The movie is starting up and their speaker crackles as it comes to life, so Chloe raises her voice, sounding more like her step-father than Warren was particularly comfortable with as she starts ordering them around, “Taller fuckers gotta sit their asses on the cold metal ground. Warren, Prickdick, that’s both of you. Max and Kate get the chairs.” And then, as she’s just barely finished talking, she dives to the ground to snap up one of the few pillows, and before Warren even realizes what is happening Nathan is doing the same. Suddenly, Warren is left pillow-less and afraid. He blinks rapidly.

“What just happened?” he asks no one in particular as Chloe and Nathan throw rude gestures at each other like they both didn’t just win the prize of a relative amount of comfort.

“Your street smarts are lacking, Warren,” Max tells him uselessly. He gives her a bewildered look. “She gave you a totally fair head start.”

“ _That_ was based on street smarts?” Warren questions in bewilderment. Chloe drops to the floor of the truck bed and makes herself comfortable in the massive blanket that coats it, the prized pillow shoved between her head and the curve of one of Max’s knees. Nathan snorts at him.

“This ain’t your stomping ground,” he offers, following Chloe’s suit in the corner farthest from the congregation Chloe, Max, and Kate made in the relative back center and slinging an arm over the lip of the truck once he’s comfortable. There’s enough room for him to kick his legs out, and he does so, nearly taking out one of Warren’s ankles in the process. “Go back to the kiddie pool.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Warren mutters, wincing away from the assault. They all ignore him. The movie’s officially going at this point, so Warren accepts his defeat with a sigh and drops down next to Nathan. He finds he can see the screen from over Nathan’s head easily despite his position behind him, but doesn’t get much of a chance to mull that fact over before Kate’s handing his blanket back with a smile.

“Thanks,” Warren more mouths than actually says to her, pulling the blanket across his lap. She nods once in acknowledgement and returns her attention to the movie as some tinned jingle half-screeches from the speaker. Despite having his own blanket, Warren can feel the moment Nathan takes hold of Warren’s from the sudden tension of the fabric straining around his knees, but, to his surprise, Nathan’s not trying to _take_ the blanket. Nathan’s overlapping the blankets and sliding his hand under, his half-curled fingers brushing icy licks against the upper length of Warren’s jeans. They settle somewhere around his hip, and Warren’s eyes dart from where they’d stared unseeingly at his lap to the back of Nathan’s head, where Nathan gives no indication that he had just done … whatever _that_ was. Or of what he wanted from the gesture, which sparks up a mild panic in the back of Warren’s mind, because he doesn’t have any real idea of what Nathan wanted with that. He was clearly on his own.

So, Warren does the only thing he can think to do: he shoves his own hand under the blanket and grabs hold of Nathan’s, maybe a little too roughly if the way his shoulder hunched up with tension was any indication, but that seems to be what Nathan wanted, because he doesn’t pull away or turn to bark something demeaning at Warren in his Nathan way. His cold fingers slide between Warren’s much warmer ones and stay there, only breaking away long enough for popcorn here and soda there, for the majority of the night.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized some people have _no idea_ I have a Tumblr, where you can find me ~~sobbing in a corner~~ sharing bits from upcoming chapters on occasion. 
> 
> [My Tumblr is here!](http://sylphofscript.tumblr.com/)


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